Ferede Aklum

Origins and early life

Ferede Yazezew Aklum was born on 15 May 1949 in Medabay, a village in Tigray near the historic city of Axum, in northern Ethiopia, where his father pushed his children towards school.

Work and career

He trained as a teacher in Addis Ababa, taught in Tigray and Gondar, became headmaster and mayor in Indabaguna, and persuaded the ORT network to open two Jewish schools in Tigray. He was a Jew of the Beta Israel community, raised, his brother Amram says, in a family that talked constantly of Jerusalem, and in 1977 an Israeli security official in Addis Ababa asked him to organise families for the journey. When Moshe Dayan, then foreign minister, revealed that Israel was arming Ethiopia in exchange for letting its Jews leave, the regime reneged and hunted Jewish activists, and Aklum fled on foot to Khartoum, arriving penniless.

He sold his gold wedding ring to pay for letters asking for help, and in January 1979 one of them reached the Mossad, asking, in English, for a ticket home. The Mossad sent Danny Limor, who took a week to find him in Khartoum, and for eighteen months the two men, Aklum hiding his identity as a Jew, brought Ethiopian Jews out through Sudan, calling it Operation Brothers. He led the first group of Ethiopian Jews to Sudan, and Ynet credits the paths he found with becoming the prototype for Operation Moses and paving the way for Operation Solomon.

When the Sudanese authorities discovered his work he left for Israel, where his family, among the first to arrive, settled in Beersheba, and he went on helping newcomers. He spent his last years between Israel and Ethiopia, growing flowers for export, and died in a hospital in Addis Ababa on 7 January 2009; he is buried in Beersheba. The Netflix film The Red Sea Diving Resort based a character on him, though his brother Naftali says it missed the real story, the journey of the Ethiopian Jews themselves.