Sigd: The Ethiopian Jewish Festival of Covenant and Longing for Zion

The Beta Israel: a hidden people

Origins: tradition and history

How Jews came to live in Ethiopia is one of the most debated questions in Jewish history, and it is best to distinguish the traditions from the documented history.¹

• The tribe of Dan. A tradition known to medieval Jews identified the Jews of Cush with the tribe of Dan. In the ninth century a traveller named Eldad HaDani claimed to come from Danites living beyond the rivers of Cush, and the sixteenth-century Egyptian authority Rabbi David ibn Zimra (the Radbaz) wrote that the Jews who come from the land of Cush are “without doubt from the tribe of Dan”.²
• Shlomo and the Queen of Sheba. An Ethiopian tradition, preserved in the national epic Kebra Nagast, says that Menelik, son of King Shlomo and the Queen of Sheba, brought Israelites to Ethiopia (compare 1 Kings 10).
• Exiles of the First Temple period, who went south through Egypt, perhaps by way of communities such as the Jewish garrison at Elephantine on the Nile.
• Historians’ reconstructions. Many modern historians argue that Beta Israel took shape as a distinct community in the Ethiopian highlands in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, drawing on ancient biblical traditions present in Ethiopia and in conflict with the Christian kingdom. Others give more weight to older Jewish influences from Egypt or South Arabia. The question remains open.³

What is certain is that for many centuries Beta Israel lived as a separate people, keeping the Sabbath strictly, observing laws of purity, circumcising on the eighth day, and calling themselves Israel. Their neighbours often called them Falasha, “strangers” or “landless ones”, a name many of them found hurtful.

Orit, kessim, and Ge’ez

The Scriptures of Beta Israel were the Orit, the Torah together with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, along with other biblical books and prayers. They did not have the Mishnah or the Talmud; they lived by the written Torah as their own tradition understood it. They did not keep Chanukah or Purim, festivals from after their separation from the rest of the Jewish people, but they did keep the biblical feasts and some festivals of their own, of which Sigd was the greatest.

Their religious leaders were the kessim (singular kes), priests and teachers who led prayer, slaughtered animals, kept the calendar, and read the Orit. The kessim remain the guardians of Sigd today.

The festival in Ethiopia

The ascent of the mountain

Sigd was celebrated in central places such as the region of Gondar, where Jews from many villages gathered. The community prepared by immersing and washing their clothes. In the morning they fasted and climbed a hill or mountain, the kessim at their head carrying the Orit wrapped in coloured cloth. Some accounts describe people carrying stones on their heads as a sign of humility and repentance.⁴

On the mountain the kessim read from the Orit, especially the giving of the Torah and the covenant, and passages of blessing and curse. The people confessed their sins and prayed for forgiveness, for the end of their exile, and for the return to Jerusalem. They bowed, prostrating themselves toward the Holy City. At midday or in the afternoon they came down, and the fast gave way to a feast, with dancing and singing into the night.

Why fifty days after Yom Kippur

The date is significant. Just as Shavuot, the giving of the Torah, comes fifty days after Pesach, Sigd comes fifty days after Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness. The ascent of the mountain recalls Mount Sinai, and the confession recalls Yom Kippur. Oral traditions differ about when and how the festival began, and scholars debate its origins and the history of its date.⁵

Nehemiah and Ezra: the model of the covenant

The kessim explained Sigd from the book of Nehemiah. After the return from Babylon, “all the people gathered themselves together as one man” to hear Ezra read the Torah (Nehemiah 8:1). As he opened the scroll, the people stood, and they bowed down:

And Ezra blessed Hashem, the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands: and they bowed their heads, and worshipped Hashem with their faces to the ground.

Later in the same month the people assembled again “with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth upon them”, separated themselves from the nations, read in the Torah for a quarter of the day, and confessed their sins for another quarter (9:1–3). The chapter ends with a covenant: “we make a sure covenant, and write it” (9:38). Reading, bowing, fasting, confessing, and renewing the covenant: this is exactly the pattern of Sigd. Beta Israel saw themselves as exiles like those in Ezra’s time, renewing their covenant until the day of return.

The journey home

Recognition as Jews

For a long time the Jewishness of Beta Israel was questioned. In 1973 Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, then Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, ruled that they are Jews, relying on the Radbaz and earlier authorities, and called for them to be brought to Israel. Other rabbinic authorities, including Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, issued similar rulings, and in 1975 the Israeli government recognized Beta Israel as eligible under the Law of Return.⁶ For many years the rabbinate nonetheless required a symbolic conversion “for safety’s sake”, which many in the community found painful; later rabbinic rulings moved away from that requirement.⁷

Operation Moses and Operation Solomon

In the early 1980s, amid famine and civil war, thousands of Ethiopian Jews walked hundreds of miles to refugee camps in Sudan, hoping to reach Israel. In Operation Moses, from November 1984 to January 1985, about 8,000 were secretly flown to Israel before news of the airlift leaked and it was halted. Thousands more did not survive the journey. Israel honours about 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died on the way to Zion with a memorial on Mount Herzl.⁸

In Operation Solomon, on 24–25 May 1991, as the Ethiopian government was collapsing, Israel flew 14,325 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel in about 36 hours. One El Al jumbo jet carried more than a thousand passengers, a world record, and babies were born on the flights.⁹ Aliyah from Ethiopia, including of the descendants of Beta Israel whose families had converted to Christianity (the Falash Mura), has continued since then in smaller numbers.

The hardships of absorption

The arrival of the Ethiopian community in Israel was a modern fulfilment of the ingathering of exiles, but it was not easy. Many lived for years in caravan sites; families were separated; the kessim lost authority in a society with a different religious leadership; parents struggled while children adapted quickly. The community faced discrimination, including the 1996 discovery that blood donations from Ethiopian Israelis had been routinely discarded, and later protests against police mistreatment. At the same time, Ethiopian Israelis have served as soldiers, officers, rabbis, physicians, and members of the Knesset, and today more than 150,000 Israelis belong to the community.¹⁰ Remembering these hardships honestly is part of keeping Sigd; the Torah commands, “Love you therefore the stranger: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19).

Sigd in Israel today

In Israel the kessim lead the main celebration in Jerusalem, at the Armon HaNatziv promenade, which overlooks the Temple Mount and the Old City. People dressed in white climb up, the kessim read from the Orit under coloured umbrellas, and the prayers are said in Ge’ez and Hebrew. In the afternoon the fast is broken and the festivities begin. Many also pray at the Western Wall.

In July 2008 the Knesset passed the Sigd Law, which made 29 Cheshvan an official state holiday, with a central state ceremony and educational activities in the schools.¹¹ Many Israelis, and many Jewish communities around the world, now mark Sigd as a day to learn the story of Ethiopian Jewry and to renew their own commitment to the covenant. Some Ethiopian rabbis have suggested that Sigd preserves something once known to all Israel, a festival of covenant renewal after the autumn feasts.¹²

Messianic reflection: the Ethiopian on the road

The Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) tells of an “Ethiopian” who had come to Jerusalem to worship:

And, behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Isaiah the prophet.

Two honest notes help us read this story. First, the “Ethiopia” of the Greek writers was the kingdom of Cush on the Nile, in today’s Sudan, ruled by queens with the title Kandake, not the highland kingdom of Aksum where Beta Israel later lived. Second, Luke does not say whether the official was a Jew, a convert, or a God-fearer from the nations; scholars debate this.¹³ Ethiopian Christians claim him as their first believer, and it is natural for Ethiopian Jews and Messianic believers alike to feel kinship with him.

What the story shows clearly is the longing of Cush for the God of Israel. The official had travelled more than a thousand miles to worship in Jerusalem, and he was reading the scroll of Isaiah. Philip, sent by the Ruach HaKodesh (the Holy Spirit), “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Yeshua” (Acts 8:35), from Isaiah 53. The official was immersed and “went on his way rejoicing” (8:39). The message about Messiah reached Africa within a few years of the resurrection, through a man who was already seeking Hashem in Jerusalem.

The Psalms had foreseen it: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31). And the prophet Zephaniah, speaking of the day when the nations will call on Hashem’s name with a pure language, adds:

From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants, even the daughter of my dispersed, shall bring my offering.

The Hebrew for “Ethiopia” here is Cush. “The daughter of my dispersed” may speak of Israel’s own scattered children in Cush, or of worshippers from the nations; Jewish commentators have read it both ways. Both are true in Ethiopia: Jews who kept the covenant in exile, and a nation that has long called on the God of Israel.

Prophetic hope: the second ingathering

Isaiah foresaw a second great exodus:

And it shall come to pass in that day, that Hashem shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.

Cush is named among the lands of return. Isaiah 18 is a prophecy about the land “beyond the rivers of Ethiopia” (18:1), that is, Cush. Scholars read it first in its setting, as a message to envoys of the Cushite kings of Isaiah’s day. But its last verse looks ahead to a gift brought to Hashem “of a people scattered and peeled… to the place of the name of Hashem of hosts, the mount Zion” (18:7), and Jewish readers have long heard in it the coming of Cush to Zion.

The airlifts of 1984 and 1991 were not the end of the prophecy, and we should not treat any modern event as its final fulfilment. The full ingathering belongs to the days of Mashiach, when “he shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isaiah 11:12), and when the nations, too, will come up to Jerusalem to worship (Zechariah 14:16). But Sigd lets us see, in our own generation, a foretaste of the promise: a people who prayed facing Jerusalem for centuries, now praying in Jerusalem.

Keeping or remembering Sigd

• Learn the story of Beta Israel, the journey through Sudan, and the airlifts. Listen to Ethiopian Israelis tell it in their own words.
• Read Nehemiah 8–9, and consider fasting until midday, as the community does, in confession and covenant renewal.
• Bow in prayer toward Jerusalem, and pray for the peace of the city and the full ingathering of Israel.
• Remember those who died on the way to Zion, and pray for those still waiting to come.
• Read Acts 8 and Zephaniah 3, and give thanks that the Torah and the good news of Messiah have reached the ends of the earth.
• Break the fast with a festive meal and with joy, as the kessim teach.

See our calendar for this year’s date.