At a tender age when most of her American and Israeli peers were learning the alphabet, playing dress-up or enjoying circle time, Yarden Fanta was herding sheep and cows.
“It was difficult,” she said of growing up in the small, remote Ethiopian village of Macha, where she lived with her parents and nine siblings. “On the other hand, I knew there was another life. What kept me going was being Jewish and knowing if we kept working, we could be in Jerusalem and the suffering would pay off.”
Fanta eventually made it to Israel, but she endured tremendous hardships along the way. Still, she persevered and became the first Ethiopian-Israeli woman to earn a doctorate.
Fanta will share her story with members of the Jewish community when she visits Baltimore from Nov. 4-10. Her visit is sponsored by the 2018 Sue Glick Liebman Visiting Israel Scholar Series of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore.
The series kicks off on Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. with an event sponsored by the Baltimore Israel Coalition in the Community Room of the Park Heights Jewish Community Center.
Nina Rosenzwog, chair of the series and Associated Women, said her committee received a number of recommendations for visiting scholars, but “Yarden’s story jumped off the page. It’s a magnificent immigrant story. Her bio is so impressive and unique. When people think about making aliyah, I don’t know that they usually think about the experiences of Ethiopian Jews.”
When she was 11, Fanta and her family fled Macha to escape civil war, famine and religious persecution. Their journey by foot through the desert to a Sudanese refugee camp took about a month.
“We didn’t know where we were going or how long it was going to take,” recalled Fanta. Once they reached Sudan, her family found that the refugee camp was a “nightmare,” said Fanta, who saw her younger sister and other family members perish there.
Relief came 11 months later when Fanta and her surviving family members were airlifted to Israel as part of Operation Moses, one of three covert airlifts that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel, beginning in 1984.
Although she always dreamed of living in the Jewish state, making the transition to Israeli life was hard for Fanta.
“It was a shock. After so many years, it’s still hard to put into words,” she said. “It was like being on another planet, to see things you never imagined. Very basic things like faucets, using the oven, electricity, supermarkets, buses, seeing white people. It was unreal. I was learning like a baby, but I had to learn everything at once.”
Fanta attended school for the first time at age 14. “I didn’t know how to read and write in any language,” she said. “I had to learn to hold a pen. I spent 24 hours a day trying to catch up so I could go to high school.”
The fact that her family moved three times after arriving in Israel only made matters more challenging for Fanta. Eventually, the family wound up in Tel Aviv, where Fanta attended a crowded, understaffed school.
Although most of her teachers seemed to have little faith in her ability to catch up with her peers, Fanta said one instructor took an interest in her.
“She said, ‘We need to give her a chance. I see a spark in her eyes,’” Fanta recalled. “[That teacher] is the reason why I am who I am today. She changed my life.”
Eventually, Fanta attended Bar Ilan Uiversity, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in criminology sociology. She received a master’s degree in educational counseling and a doctorate in science and technology in education from Tel Aviv University. (She completed her post-doctoral study at Harvard University.)
She believes that racism in some segments of Israeli society accounts for why people doubted her intelligence and academic abilities.
“When I started [her doctorate program], all 35 people in the class said, ‘How’s she going to make it?’” she said. “[People ask], ‘Really, you have a Ph.D.?’ You need to prove you are who you are. It takes a lot of self-advocacy.”
Today, Fanta is a senior associate fellow at Brandeis University and a mother of two. She and her family reside in Newton, Mass., where she directs production and partnerships at the Jewish Arts Collaborative. A motivational speaker, career coach and host of “Zoom In,” a public-access TV show dedicated to empowering women and young adults, Fanta enjoys sharing her life experiences with others.
“If there’s something I can do to spread the word about the importance of Jewish education and can inspire others, I feel it’s my responsibility,” she said.
Fanta, who plans to eventually return to her adopted homeland, also wants American Jews to understand that “Israel is more than a political issue. There are diverse communities. It’s diverse socially, economically and politically. It’s not perfect, but Israel does a lot to include people.”
For information about the by 2018 Sue Glick Liebman Visiting Israel Scholar Series, visit associated.org/israelscholar or call 410-369-9264.
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