I Volunteered for This?! Life on an Archaeological Dig
tion, when the Babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar swept down from the
north and obliterated the city, taking Aga, the last Philistine king of
Ashkelon, back to Babylon as a captive.
As I passed the stones from the dismantled wall to David and Denis, I
could feel a growing, wordless change in our relationship, our awareness of one
another. Sharing physical tasks can do that, even when few words are spoken.
As we struggled with the stones, some weighing 60 or 70 pounds and more,
each of us tried to take more of the burden on ourselves to spare the others. We
grunted and made noises of encouragement and concern. Our fingers overlapped as we hefted the rough ashlars, and we reached out to steady one
another when one of us swayed or stumbled. When the task was done and the
wall was down, I felt that I had made two new friends.
Unfortunately, our ability to communicate was limited. I spoke no
Hebrew and Denis only rudimentary English. David, though he had studied
Hebrew at an ulpan, was fluent only in Amharic, the ancient Semitic language spoken by Ethiopians.
David communicated without language. At breakfast time, he invited
me to join him and the other Ethiopian workers for a meal of injera, the big,
spongy wheat-flour pancakes that are eaten with a spicy paste of chickpeas
and vegetables. I would bring my Israeli breakfast of bread, cucumbers,
tomatoes and cheese, and we would sit on the grass in the shade of a
tamarisk tree and share.
llene Perlman
One morning Denis asked me in his simple English if I had seen the film Lethal Weapon. When I told him that I
had, his face brightened. “I see Lethal Weapon and other film of American police, and I think police in U.S. have life
always exciting and fun, and therefore I want to go to America and be policeman.”
I spent the better part of that morning trying to persuade him that Hollywood cop films glamorize the lives of police,
which in reality can be tedious, frustrating and often very unrewarding. I’m still not sure whether or not I got through.
Although I volunteered at Ashkelon primarily to learn about Israel’s ancient past, some of my most memorable
encounters were with people like Denis and David, representatives of Israel’s present. I learned that the modern State
of Israel, no less than its ancient counterpart, is a meeting place of cultures, a truly diverse society in which the forces
of contemporary history converge. And perhaps because verbal communication with my new friends proved so difficult,
I made it my business to learn as much as I could about them from other sources. Many of the answers to my questions
could be found by looking at Israel’s recent immigration history.
There are now about 43,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, the majority having arrived during two massive airlifts—
Operation Moses, which took place between November 1984 and January 1985, and Operation Solomon, which airlifted
14,200 Ethiopians into Israel over 36 hours in May 1991.
The migration of Soviet Jews to Israel has risen and fallen according to changes in Soviet policy. The numbers
remained fairly high during most of the 1970s, dropped to a trickle during the early 1980s, then, with the coming of
perestroika, rose to a torrent in 1990, when more than 185,000 Soviet Jews entered Israel. In 1991, 145,000 arrived,
and the estimate for the first half of 1992 is 27,000. Immigration authorities project that a total of one million Soviet
Jews will enter Israel during the 1990s.
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