Luncheon Speaker Discusses Operation Solomon

Posted by Bill Paul 
on Jan 28, 2016
 
(REDONDO BEACH, California - January 27, 2016) "Ethiopia was not on my list," said luncheon speaker, Todd Gindy, "but my experience there changed my life."  While not a Rotarian, Gindy's heart-felt description of the experience that changed his life had echoes of "the Rotary moment" so often recounted by Rotarians upon their return from one of RI's many humanitarians trips abroad. 
 
Gindy told about Operation Solomon, a covert Israeli military airlift that occurred in 1991. His presentation and his role in its continuation sounded as if it were a lecture in foreign policy, rather than a Jewish story with origins 3,000 years ago. (Click here to view a 19 minute YouTube video of Operation Solomon.)
 
"I was active in the local Jewish Federation and engaged in activities similar to what you do in Rotary -- feeding  the hungry, raising money for worthwhile local charitable causes and so on.  One day I realized I wanted more out of life.  So I asked our leadership what else I could do. The president of our organization told me she was off to Ethiopia in a week or so and soon I was invited to participate. So from the time I ran into the issue within 8 or 9 days I was in Ethiopia."
 
There, in 2006, Gindy helped in the continuing effort to bring families from Ethiopia to Israel.  During the original Operation Solomon 15 years earlier, 14,325 Black Ethiopian Jews were evacuated to Israel in 36 hours!
 
How a tribe of black Jews came to be in Ethiopia in the first place remains a historical mystery. It is one of those "lost in the mists of time" myths. Indeed there are several "origin" theories, most rooted in events or personalities that appear in the Old Testament.
 
Irrespective of the theory one prefers, he continued, at its height the Jewish population of Ethiopia rose to as many as 1,000,000 individuals.  By the time of their discovery by Western Jewry nearly 100 years ago, the total population is estimated to have fallen below 100,000.
 
Ethiopian Jews began their exodus to Israel in the early 1970's, more than three decades before during what was known at the time as Operation Moses.  Rebel groups were threatening Ethiopia portending dangerous regional political destabilization, and the U.S. government and Jewish groups worldwide took note.
 
In his presentation Gindy segued into the political challenges to the human challenge of preparing a people ill-equipped for a journey out of the 15th century into one of the most advance society in the western world over the course of a 4 1/2 hour plane ride.  He gave a concise dissertation about Middle Eastern/North African politics of the mid-to-late 1980s involving Sudan, Ethiopia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Mossad--Israel's secret intelligence service--Vice President George H.W. Bush, Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jewish interest groups.
 
 
The highlight of Gindy's presentation was what can only be described as his Rotary Moment, or at least the equivalent of it.
 
He gave a moment by moment commentary about the commitment, and then the experience, of bringing long-lost members of his community to Israel, and how that touched his life. He verbally walked us through a shantytown he visited in Addis Ababa which he described as a "cesspool of humanity," that he and his group of well-to-do American Jews found themselves in for Operation Solomon. 
 
In 1991, 35 Israeli commercial and military aircraft were used in Operation Solomon. Seats were removed. One aircraft ferried 1,122 individuals, among them 140 frail elderly who required medical attention.  Two babies were born during the flights.
 
In his words--the terrifying landing at an airfield in the middle of nowhere unequipped with radar or other modern avionics, with armed guards in the front seat of the aircraft, and upon landing the poverty, the stench of walking adjacent to an exposed sewer and the instruction "to breathe through your mouth and not nose," food preparation in buckets that "you wouldn't paint your house with let along prepare a meal in," a school where the floor is dirt and the walls made of mud, children in dirty clothes and filthy shoes, and more.  He acknowledged that words are inadequate to describe the 24  hours he spent there, adding, "I'll never forget (it) yet hope to never experience it again."
 
But then this life-changing moment: "The children stood in front of us and sang in magical chorus-their songs, although unfamiliar (were) of their Jewish heritage.  I did not know the words because they sang in their native Amharic, but their spirit filled my soul," he said.  "For 15 minutes I was home with my people, Jews in a far away corner of the world. I left a big part of myself on that school yard that morning. Thank god for the children."
 
"I was not alive when a Jew in Eastern Europe needed to be protected, but I am today.  I have traveled to the depths of our world and have taken families by the hand and delivered them to a better place.  I watched them kiss the ground as they took their first stops in Israel....I was part of something that changed my life," he said, to a rapt audience among whom the Rotary Moment is a shared experience of humanity.