Ethiopia

Joseph Gitler, a Manhattan native who worked here as a lawyer before making aliyah 10 years ago, is founder of the largest food rescue and food resource organization in Israel, Leket Israel, originally known as Table to Table.

Gitler, 35, said his group reaches 20,000 people daily in Israel and annually distributes nearly 1 million meals, 1 million sandwiches to schoolchildren, and about 14 million pounds of produce and dairy products to nearly 250 nonprofit organizations in Israel.

Rabbi Sharon Shalom is one of the first Ethiopian Israelis to be ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. He is the spiritual leader of a congregation of about 100 people, most of them Holocaust survivors, in Kiryat Gan.

Elad Wassie was working in Netanya’s open-air vegetable market when a suicide bomber detonated a shrapnel-laden explosive nearly three years ago. Wassie awoke in the hospital to learn that a nail lodged in his spine had paralyzed him from the waist down. He refused to utter a word for nearly two months.“I needed time to absorb what happened to me and decide what I was going to do with my life,” said Wassie, 28, who emigrated from Ethiopia to Israel via Sudan in 1985.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is preparing to return to Ethiopia, just four months after it virtually shut down its operations in the African nation at the request of the Israeli government. Reports of death, illness and impoverished conditions among the thousands of Ethiopians who have flooded into the capital city of Addis Ababa and Gondar City prompted the move by the relief agency.