On Monday, Lower School and Middle School students were treated to one of the most engaging and interesting speakers CJDS has ever hosted. Ethiopian/Israeli Rabbi Sharon Shalom shared his remarkable story of leaving Ethiopia as a young child and acclimating to life in Israel. Rabbi Shalom's knack for storytelling and speaking to audiences of teens and younger children kept everyone captivated and hanging on his every word. 

Rabbi Sharon described how, as a child in Ethiopia, in his village, they dreamed of one day going to Eretz Yisrael, the land of milk and honey, where everyone was Jewish and they could live in peace. After the community waited two thousand years, he walked from Ethiopia to Sudan for two months. Then, eight-year-old Shalom immigrated with his aunt and uncle to Jerusalem through "Operation Moses," a collaboration between the Mossad, the CIA, and the Sudanese State Security to smuggle thousands of members of Beta Israel out of Ethiopia, where they faced hardship and persecution. 

Among his many poignant words, Rabbi Shalom described that when an Israeli commander picked up and carried him, he and the commander cried because they realized they were "two brothers reunited after two thousand years." The program aptly ended with the song Hinei Mah Tov umah-nayim, "Behold how good and pleasing it is for brothers to sit together in unity."