Adisu Massala

Origins and early life

Adisu Massala, also spelled Addisu Messele, was born in Gondar province in northern Ethiopia, where as a young man he joined an underground party fighting the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Work and career

One of eight children, he walked thirty-two days, mostly barefoot, to Khartoum and spent a year in Sudan helping other Ethiopian Jews on their way to Israel, which he reached in 1980. His Israeli papers made him nineteen though, he says, he was twenty-six, and at the absorption centre in Beersheba he was renamed David, a change he fought until he had his own name back. He belongs to the Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, and in his words his family had lived their entire lives as Jews in Ethiopia, yet the Rabbinate required them, like other Beta Israel immigrants, to undergo a precautionary conversion.

Trained as a social worker at Bar-Ilan University, he chaired the umbrella organisation of Ethiopian Jews in Israel and in 1983 organised a demonstration outside the Knesset for those still in Ethiopia to be brought over. In August 1985, he recalls, the community began a thirty-two-day strike outside the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem and held out until the precautionary conversion was dropped. In 1996 he was elected to the fourteenth Knesset on the Labor list, in the place reserved for an immigrant, the first member of the Knesset from Israel's Ethiopian community.

That year he was among the leaders of the protest after it emerged that Magen David Adom had been throwing away blood donated by Ethiopian Israelis. In 1999 he left Labor with Amir Peretz for the new One Nation party but lost his seat, and Peretz later gave him a senior post in the leadership of the Histadrut labour federation. He has told his story in an autobiography, From the Underground in Gondar to the Knesset in Jerusalem, and by 2022 he was living between Bat Yam and Addis Ababa.