For more than two decades, Mehretu Mesgano Damasah has fought to reunite with his daughters. In 2003, he immigrated to Israel, leaving behind his two young girls, Masrat and Banchi, with the promise that they would soon follow. While Masrat joined him two and a half years ago after a prolonged legal battle, Banchi remains in Ethiopia, still waiting.
“Twenty-two years I have been fighting, no answer, 22 years I have been suffering,” Mehretu told Davar ahead of an expected court decision that could finally allow Banchi to immigrate. With the help of the Israel Religious Action Center’s Legal Action Center for Olim, Damasah and his family now await the court’s ruling.
Today, immigration from Ethiopia is almost entirely frozen. Israel claims that all those eligible to move to Israel under the Law of Return have already immigrated, leaving future immigration dependent on special government resolutions. About 14,000 individuals are waiting in Gondar and Addis Ababa, including 1,226 already deemed eligible but whose arrivals are delayed by budget constraints.
The Mesgano Damasah family’s case is particularly complex. Mehretu said he was pressured to immigrate alone, with promises that his daughters would follow. “They marked me as single, even though I was married with two daughters,” he said, describing a registration error that haunted him for years.
In 2021, after endless inquiries to the Ministry of the Interior, Mehretu received official notice that the state had refused his daughters’ immigration. Legal proceedings followed. In 2022, Israel reversed its decision regarding Masrat, allowing her to immigrate—but denied Banchi, despite identical documentation for both.
“In the previous court ruling, the tribunal ordered the authority to investigate how it was decided to allow one sister to immigrate while the other was not on the list,” said Rachel Fish Ben-Israel of the Legal Action Center for Olim. “Now the Population Authority claims that Banchi is indeed on the list, but the quota has been filled, and therefore she cannot immigrate.”
A hearing on the appeal was held on April 15.
“I was with my sister, I studied and lived with her,” Masrat, who studied computer science and currently works in a factory in Kiryat Gat, told Davar. After completing an Orthodox conversion process and learning Hebrew, Masrat began settling into life in Israel. She now hopes for her younger sister’s immigration.
“The day I made Aliyah to Israel, I cried and she cried too,” she recounted. “It was hard to say goodbye,” she recalls.
Their father fears for Banchi’s safety back in Ethiopia. “We have no family left there, and all of Banchi’s documents are in Gondar. She is afraid to go there because of the security situation,” he said. To strengthen their case, Mehretu sought the help of Rabbi Menachem Waldman, the Chief Rabbinate’s representative for Ethiopian Jewry, who confirmed Banchi’s family ties in an official document.
“I will not give up on my daughter under any circumstances,” said Mehretu. If the court rules against them, the family plans to continue appealing until they are reunited.
This article was translated from Hebrew by Ronen Cohen.
