Pnina Tamano-Shata

Origins and early life

Pnina Tamano-Shata was born in Wuzaba, a village near Gondar in northern Ethiopia; her Israeli identity card gives 1 November 1981, a date she chose herself for want of any accurate record of her birth. She was born into the Beta Israel, the Jewish community of Ethiopia, as a granddaughter of the kes Shato, one of the spiritual leaders of the Ethiopian Jews.

Work and career

In 1984, at the age of three, she walked to Sudan with her father and her five brothers, on what she later called a cross-desert foot journey, while her mother stayed behind and only joined them later. They were among the almost 7,000 Ethiopian Jews whom Israel airlifted in secret between November 1984 and January 1985, in the evacuation known as Operation Moses. The family spent its first years in an absorption centre and moved to Petah Tikva in 1988, and she was sent to boarding schools far from home, as many Ethiopian children then were.

After her army service she studied law at Ono Academic College, fought discrimination against Ethiopian Israelis as a student leader and then became a correspondent for Israel's public Channel 1. Elected for Yesh Atid in 2013, she became the first Ethiopian-born woman to sit in the Knesset; she lost her seat in 2015 and returned to it in 2018. On 17 May 2020 she was sworn in as Minister of Aliyah and Integration, the first Ethiopian-born member of an Israeli cabinet, and she held the post until the end of 2022.

As minister she led, with Isaac Herzog of the Jewish Agency, Operation Tzur Israel, whose final flight, in March 2021, completed the immigration of close to two thousand members of the Ethiopian community.

Recognition

She received the Magen Begin Prize for Israeli leadership in June 2021 and, back in the Knesset in 2022 for National Unity, went on to chair its committee for the status of women and gender equality.