Photo by
Ministry of Immigration and Absorption/TPS-IL on 26 May, 2025
Memorial to Ethiopian Jews Burns Down After Ceremony
Jerusalem, 26 May, 2025 (TPS-IL) -- Minutes after a national ceremony honoring Ethiopian Jews who died trying to reach Israel, the memorial in Jerusalem was badly damaged in front of stunned onlookers.
As the ceremony concluded, firefighting aircraft were seen circling overhead, triggering panic among attendees. The aircraft were battling a brush fire that broke out by the western edge of the capital. But it became clear that the monument caught fire, apparently from memorial candles lit by the families. Guests who came to pay their respects unsuccessfully tried to put out the fire. themselves.
Authorities are investigating how the fire started. The monument included space for memorial candles. According to the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, 20 new names were recently inscribed.
The ceremony — attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, and Minister of Immigration and Absorption Ofir Sofer — was meant to commemorate an estimated 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died of disease, starvation, exhaustion, and violence trying to reach Israel in the 1980s and 1990s. Many were buried without names or gravestones in the Sudanese desert.
“The perilous journey on foot through the Ethiopian and Sudanese routes required great sacrifice. Every step in this wild space was accompanied by tension, accompanied by great terror, and also accompanied by pain,” said Netanyahu.
“These were extreme experiences that left deep scars. We see it here every year. I see you taking the stage: a mother who lost her three children; others who lost their parents, relatives; an arduous walk for long weeks in the scorching heat of the day and the absolute darkness of the night; the cruel natural disasters; the severe shortage of food and water; the diseases and epidemics; the inhuman violence of those in power, these wild thugs, in Ethiopia and Sudan. This daily battle for survival required endless sacrifice from you,” he said.
Herzog called the immigration of Ethiopian Jewry “an important and inseparable part of the Zionist story.”
“We must teach it in kindergartens and schools, in all Israeli communities; to nurture it, and to pass it on from generation to generation,” he said. “This is our duty to the victims and to you, the family members. A duty that carries within it a great privilege, a duty that carries within it great faith.”
While the airlifts of thousands of Ethiopian Jews in 1984 and 1991 are well-known, “for the members of the community, the journey to Sudan and their stay there left deep scars to this day,” said Sofer.
Israel’s Ethiopian community stands at 171,600, of whom 54% were born in Ethiopia as of 2023, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.
