zimatravels

The following is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.  The weddings I describe took place in 1984 and September of 1993.

     Almost a decade ago, in 1984, I was one of very few non-Ethiopians who attended a group wedding for new immigrant Ethiopian couples in Israel.  They were caught in a sad conflict between Jew and Jew because laws for marriage in Israel were set out by Orthodox Jews, who didn’t accept Ethiopians as Jews without a ritual conversion.  The Ethiopian Jews, who had guarded and preserved their Jewishness through much oppression in Ethiopia, were humiliated by such a demand and refused to go through even a symbolic conversion.  So, several couples were married in this ceremony in the Ethiopian tradition by their religious leaders with the grooms wearing red headbands.

     The wedding I attended in 1993 was quite a different affair, which affirmed the Ethiopian Jew in Israel.  It was quite an incredible mixture of American, Jewish, Ethiopian, and Israeli cultures and customs.

     The wedding was held in a typical Israeli wedding hall.  The Israeli man in charge of the hall had the looks, demeanor, and personality better suited to an undertaker, but the wedding guests looked more like movie stars because Ethiopians are generally truly beautiful.  They have bright, white, strong teeth, regal profiles, and large eyes with long, curly eyelashes.  There was an old woman dressed in the colorful traditional Ethiopian dress wearing sneakers, and a traditionally dressed Ethiopian man wearing a snappy Stetson hat.  Some guests were dressed casually like a day around the house, while others had on elegant attire.  Some flashy suits reminded me of the zoot suit era of blacks in the U.S. in the 1970’s.

     The invitations said 7 p.m., but meant 8.  It had correctly added that the party would continue until the light of day.  Pink envelopes were handed out at the door in which guests were expected to put money and drop it in a convenient box for that purpose.

     The officiating rabbi was Israeli, and the wedding ceremony was a rather bizarre collection of rituals — Israeli handclapping, the western song, “Lady, Don’t Hurt Me,” eastern ululating followed by the Jewish custom of the groom breaking glass under his foot.

     The food was bland Israeli instead of spicy Ethiopian food, and the dancing alternated among Israeli, black American, and the competitive Ethiopian upper chest movements.  A few photographers went around taking pictures of guests, developing them, and then offering them to the guests for a price.

     It was hard to place them as the patient, starving Ethiopians plucked from refugee camps in the Sudan, or more recently brought from Ethiopia in planes that literally catapulted them out of the third world into the modern world.  They have an air of self-confidence now, of belonging to Israel, but they have not yet acquired the abrasiveness of native Israelis.  Their smile is still too quick, too warm, and too shy.  But Israeli ways such as heavy smoking are appearing more and more.  Integration of cultures is always a mixed blessing.