ICEJ AID
Celebrating the “Sigd” festival with Ethiopian students by Birte Scholz
In recent years, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has been helping to fund a special studies program for Ethiopian Jewish students enrolled at the Ruppin Academic Center near Netanya. A delegation from the ICEJ staff recently visited students at the college as they prepared to celebrate a unique Ethiopian Jewish communal festival called “Sigd”.
The Ethiopian students were cheerfully dishing out their traditional Sigd foods to their fellow Jewish students before some of the ladies performed songs and dances in their colourful ethnic dresses. “When we were still in Ethiopia we fasted in the mornings for fifty days after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement”, explained Ma´ayan, one of the Ethiopian Jewish students
10 | MARCH 2014