Return to Your Borders

One man’s struggle to rescue his fellow Jews stranded in Sudan

Back in 1984, a young Ethiopian Jewish girl named Tuwavich Berko said goodbye to her two older brothers as they set out by foot across the Sudanese desert, where they hoped to be airlifted to Israel. That was the time of Operation Moses, a clandestine Israeli rescue operation that began shortly after a devastating famine swept through Ethiopia, threatening the survival of the local Jewish community. Ethiopian Jews had been making their way to southern Sudan from 1980, where over the next four years about 3,000 of them would be rescued either through neighboring Kenya or by Israeli commando boats via the Red Sea. Now, thousands of Ethiopian Jews trekked through the deserts of Ethiopia and Sudan with the hope of reaching Sudanese refugee camps where they would be saved by Israeli rescue teams.

Over 8,000 of them made it to Israel during the six-week airlift operation, but it’s estimated that another 4,000 died during the arduous journey — either by starvation, dehydration, or attacks by local militias. While Tuwavich stayed behind with her ailing father, she had no idea whatever happened to her brothers, or to any of her neighbors who longed for Jerusalem and traversed the desert in order to get there. Did the Israeli planes come for them? Were they slaughtered by Sudanese insurgents along the way? Did they succumb to the elements?

Seven years later, in 1991, Israel embarked on Operation Solomon, a record-setting 36-hour operation in which Israel airlifted another 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from the capital of Addis Ababa. But Tuwavich was no longer in Ethiopia. In between those two rescues, Tuwavich’s father had passed away, and she decided to cross the border into Sudan to meet her hoped-for Israeli rescuers.

Instead, she was arrested and thrown into a Sudanese jail, where the warden took a liking to her. Rather than having her killed, he released her and forced her to marry him — and so, a young teenager with no family behind her and a hopeless future before her, she buried her Jewish past. When the couple had their first daughter, they named her Piath, which means “good.” Piath was followed by another daughter, Suzy.