When Shlomo was born in Ambover, Ethiopia, his father, a farmer, experienced a sudden rise in his fortunes, so he named the boy Liku*, Amharic for kingdom.  At age six, his older siblings taught him to read and write, and at eight, Shlomo began attending the Jewish ORT School in Gondar, Ethiopia.

"It was always in our consciousness that we were coming to Jerusalem," Shlomo says. His physical journey to Sudan as a refugee began when he was 12, with his uncles and two of his brothers. During the month-long trek and afterwards, he experienced hunger, thirst, crowded refugee camps and the deaths of family and friends. 

"The hardest thing was seeing people carrying their children to be buried," says Shlomo. In Sudan, as well as in boarding school in Israel, Shlomo expressed the horrors and traumas, the tears, pain, loneliness, longings for his parents and for the environment in which he grew up in a series of notebooks.

"I described exactly when people I knew got sick, what they said before they died." Shlomo said one particular scene will accompany him as long as he lives.

"I sat next to a boy my age who was dying. He said, 'Promise me that you will write a letter to my parents and my brothers and tell them not to come to Sudan. Tell them the dream is just that -- a dream.'"

In light of the suffering his community endured to reach the Promised Land, Shlomo feels particularly pained at their reality today.

"When I see the problems facing my community in Israel, I think, it can't be that a community that dreamt and longed to reach Jerusalem (Zion) would be rejected and unwanted here. I think about this all the time. I have developed defense mechanisms. I am strong. But how are families who lost sons and daughters and parents on the way to fulfilling their dream of return to Zion supposed to feel in the face of the racism they encounter here?"

Separated from his parents for six years, Shlomo studied at Yemin Orde, a boarding school run by educator Chaim Perry. "He made us believe in ourselves," Shlomo says. "If someone wasn't good academically, he helped him find what he was good at. If you meet a successful young Ethiopian today, chances are he or she graduated from Yemin Orde."

Shlomo's army officer accompanied him to meet his parents when they arrived in Israel. "I felt the excitement like a physical rush of ecstasy," he recalls. "When I hugged my mother, she didn't want to let me go. For six long years, I didn't experience that warmth, that love. I understood then the power of the love that Ethiopian parents have for their children and I ask myself, today, do I have the ability to give this kind of love to my children?"

Shlomo earned a BA in psychology and human services and an MA in management from Haifa University and also studied community organizing. While there, he helped found the Ethiopian Students Union (ESU), which advocated for the special needs of students of Ethiopian origin. Shlomo encountered SHATIL through his ESU work and today, he advises the current leadership of the ESU. Shlomo began working for SHATIL as a student in 1998, helping new Ethiopian immigrants with the transition from absorption centers to permanent housing and later working with local Ethiopian organizations.

"Chaim Perry (the Yemin Orde principal) recently told me that our community had a dream and that dream helped us get through all the difficulties in Ethiopia and Sudan. But the dream came true and now we have no dream to help us get though the difficulties here. He said we need a new dream to give us strength, to take the place of the dream of Zion which kept us from going crazy in the face of tragedy and suffering." 

Shlomo says SHATIL changed him.

"My narrow view of the world widened. I became sensitive to issues of equality and social justice. SHATIL connected me with all kinds of sectors, exposed me to different perspectives. I understand others distress better. And it changed my relationship with the Arab sector. I feel I have a common language with my Arab colleagues and I now have Arab friends."

Shlomo's dream is that the relationship between the Ethiopian community and native Israelis will grow to become one of respect and equality, "that a person won't be judged based on the color of his skin, on his culture or because he's different."  Shlomo is married to Riki Tegave, the director of Hiyot, a Haifa based Ethiopian women's organization, and they have two children. He continues to write in his notebooks.

* Most Ethiopian Jews had their names changed upon immigrating to Israel.