There are stories that history begins to tell only from the moment they become drama: the moment of departure, the moment of danger, the moment of crossing.

This happened more than once with the story of the Beta Israel community. For decades, the Israeli narrative reduced us to the “journey story”: the hardships of Sudan, the heroism of the march, the pain, the loss and the tormented longing.

But before there was a journey – there was life.

There were villages. There were houses. There was faith. There was a living and rooted value system. There were traditions, prayers, families, women, children, elders and a whole community that carried a deep and ancient Jewish-African world.

In my eyes, the story before the ascension is not a marginal prologue. He is the heart from which everything came.

It’s time to stop telling us only through the “no” and the lack of absorption, and start telling us also through the huge “yes” we brought with us.

Osmosis of identity: the village as a space of power

Life in the Jewish villages in Ethiopia was not just a setting. They were the space where our identity was created.

There, identity was not conveyed in lectures or heritage classes. She passed by osmosis.

As children, we lived on the periphery of the adult world. We were not the center, but we breathed the rhythm of the house: the smell of the beaver, the sounds of prayer, the respect for the elders, the communal responsibility and the sense of belonging that was built not from big words, but from a whole life.

A child growing up in this world didn’t have to learn who he was. He was part of a living continuity.

It is a non-verbal knowledge that is engraved in the body. A memory that was assimilated in us even before it received words.

The women: the silent spine

One of the most missing parts of the pre-aliyah story is the voice of the women.

They were not always in the center of the official stage, but they were the backbone that held everything together.

Women who carried a house.
Women who have borne children.
Women who bore silence.
Women who carried a deep-rooted faith that kept families whole even in impossible conditions.

Their leadership was not always recorded in documents, but it was one of the most profound forms of leadership: the leadership of the everyday. The ability to have a home, memory, faith and community – even when the road is cracked.

Out of the desire to give voice to this feminine, rooted and intergenerational world, my book was born “A scarred stone“.

I wanted to restore these women to their place in the story – not as background characters, but as the driving force of the community.

Longing as a compass, not as a weakness

The longing for Jerusalem was not an inhibiting nostalgic emotion. He was an organizing force.

He gave the community direction. He maintained a sense of belonging even when Jerusalem was far from sight.

The journey to Israel did not begin at the moment of leaving the village. He started much earlier – in every prayer, in every holiday, in every story, in every look that was carried to the horizon.

These acquisitions were the backbone of generations. They kept us upright even when the road cracked.

Why is this amendment necessary today?

When the story begins only with the “wound” of the immigration and absorption, the community is perceived mainly through pain, lack and distress. These are real parts of the story, but they are not the whole story.

The correction I would like to propose gives us back the depth:

We didn’t come from empty.
We didn’t come because of a lack of culture.
We didn’t just come out of distress.

We came from an ancient and living Jewish-African world. from tradition. out of faith from a community structure. From women and men who led whole lives even before their story met the State of Israel.

When the full story is told, the perspective of the next generation also changes.

Our children do not just inherit a story of hardship. They also inherit a story of resilience, depth and continuity. They don’t need to reinvent themselves. They can reconnect with the sources of power that already exist within them.

return the missing chapter

“A scarred stone” is where Nagasti’s personal story meets our collective story.

This is an attempt to look back at the life that was there before. Not as nostalgia for the past, but as a way to the future.

Before there was an ascension, there was life.
Before there was a journey, there were roots.
Before the story reached Israel, it already carried a deep, ancient and living voice within it.

The time has come for Israelis to learn to listen to this voice – not as a story of “others”, but as an integral part of the mosaic of all of us.

To get to know the world behind “scarred stone”.“

This article is part of the content world of “A scarred stone“, a novel about the women of Beta Israel in Ethiopia, about the life before the journey, and about the power absorbed in memory.

הפוסט We did not come from nothing – the missing chapter in the Israeli story הופיע לראשונה ב-Fentay Maharat-Alamu.

The longing that belongs to us all

There are longings that do not belong to just one person. They go through family, community, language, prayer and looking to a place you’ve never seen – yet you know it’s a part of you.

For the Beta Israel community, the holiday of the Tsiggad was never just a time on the calendar. He was a language. A language of longing, of faith, of memory and of home. A language that said: Even if we are far from Jerusalem, Jerusalem is not far from us.

In my eyes, the mosque is not just a dream of one community. It is a gateway to a much broader Israeli conversation about the question: What is a home?

A longing that is not a weakness

In a world that sanctifies fast forward movement, longing is sometimes seen as something inhibiting, as if the person who misses remains stuck in the past. But the holiday of the mosque teaches us that there are longings that do not seek to take us back – they seek to remind us of who we are.

The longing for Jerusalem was not only longing for a geographical place. He was longing for a bigger story, within which a person knows his place. It is a longing that keeps a person upright even when the road is long. A longing that becomes a compass.

The zigged as a language of memory: what is burned into the mind without realizing it

The holiday of the mosque teaches us that memory is not only what we preserve from the past, but also the way in which we build the future. For generations, this memory was not only passed on in history lessons or books. He was burned through life itself.

As children, we were on the periphery of the world of praying adults. We were not the center, but we were there, on the side. Between the sounds of prayer, the smell of beaver and the continuous gaze of the elders towards Jerusalem, we absorbed the emotional map of the community.

This memory was assimilated into the body even before we knew how to call it by name. The mosque is a profound lesson in the power of a community to remember together – not only what happened, but where it belongs.

Multi-rooted Israeliness: not a zero-sum game

The Israeli challenge is not only to “live together”. The deeper challenge is to understand that identity is not a zero-sum game: bringing one root into the common house does not require the deletion of another.

At times, the Israeli story asked us to leave parts of our identity outside the door in order to come inside. But deep Israeliness is not built from erasure, but from the ability to hold plurality.

Hag Tsigd offers a model of complete success: the possibility of being part of the Israeli story not despite our roots, but through them.

Multi-rooted Israeliness is not a split identity – it is a richer identity. The shared house becomes more stable when everyone who enters it is not required to forget where they came from.

What can the mosque teach us today?

In an era where many feel torn or unmoored, the holiday of the Tsigd brings us back to a simple and profound question: what gives us an inner backbone?

The synagogue teaches that belonging is not created only by living in the same place. It is also created from the ability to share a memory, to listen to stories we have not yet known, and to agree that each community has its own way of carrying longing, faith and identity.

When one community’s holiday succeeds in opening a conversation about home, faith and identity – it stops being just a holiday of “others”. He becomes a mirror for all of us.

The connection to the world of “scarred stone”.“

My preoccupation with the mosque and the story before the ascension was born from the same place from which my book was born “scarred stone”: The desire to return depth to a story that is sometimes only told from the outside.

Before the journey there was life. There were houses. There were strong women. There was a belief that permeated the air. There was a community that longed for Jerusalem not as an abstract idea, but as a force that organizes an entire life.

When we tell this story fully, we allow the next generation to understand that belonging does not just begin at the moment of arrival. It begins much earlier – with a memory that did not give up, a belief that was preserved, and a voice that was passed down from generation to generation even when it was not always said in words.

So are we ready for a house with many roots?

The holiday of the mosque reminds us that home is not only the place we arrive at, but also the place we carry inside us along the way. He is the unbroken memory. He is the longing that became power. He is the faith that kept going even when it didn’t see the end of the road.

And perhaps the time has come to ask ourselves: are we mature enough, as Israelis, to stop being afraid of the other’s longing? Can we open the listening doors of our society more, so that each person can bring his roots to the common house – without losing himself along the way?

Get to know the story behind the roots

This article is part of the content world of “scarred stone” – A novel about the women of Beta Israel in Ethiopia, about memory, roots and intergenerational female power.

הפוסט The longing that built a home הופיע לראשונה ב-Fentay Maharat-Alamu.

Nagasti was not born the day I sat down to write. She was not the result of plot planning, a literary exercise or a technical decision by a writer looking for a heroine. In the deepest sense, she was there long before I had chapters, a plot, or a name for the book.

She lives in the conversations I absorbed in my childhood, in my mother’s stories that were absorbed in me almost without me knowing, in the silences between sentences, and in the gaze of women who knew how to carry an entire world on their shoulders without making the pain a headline.

I always knew that if I wrote my first book, she would be at the center of it. Not as a character meant to “represent” a community, nor as a flat symbol of a strong woman, but as one woman, private, complex, vulnerable, stubborn and complete, through whom the story must be told.

Nagasti was born from my mother, but she is not a copy of her. She carries something of her spirit, her nobility, her pains and her way of dealing with life. And at the same time, she was also born from other women in the community; From women I’ve seen, from women I’ve heard about, and from women who didn’t get someone to write their name.

In this sense, Nagasti is both a single woman and a collective woman. A literary figure, but one in which many will be able to recognize something from themselves, from their mothers, from their grandmothers, or from the women who supported entire families without calling it leadership.

Queen without a crown

The choice of the name Nagasti, which means my queen, is not accidental. This is my mother’s original name, so choosing it was an act of personal loyalty. But the Nagasti of the book is not a queen in the external sense. She doesn’t have a crown, she doesn’t have a palace, and she doesn’t have a world that is quick to recognize her position.

Her kingdom is different. This is inner nobility. The way a woman carries her broken bones without losing her spine. The way she continues to walk even when life forces her to say goodbye, to lose, to be silent, to believe, to be angry, to miss and to choose again.

It was important to me that Nagasti not only be “strong”. This word, standing alone, can turn women into characters who are not allowed to break. Nagasti is strong, but she is also weak. She believes, but also hurts. She is stubborn, but also vulnerable. She carries within her mothers, wisdom of life, restrained anger and deep longing for the girls she lost.

This is a woman who faced severe losses at a very young age, with pain that could have collapsed her world, and yet she carried on. Not because it was not broken, but because even after the break something alive remained in it. Something that refused to go away.

One woman who carries many women’s questions

The heroine of the story, Nagasti, is deeply rooted in the world of Beta Israel: in the Jewish villages in Ethiopia, in life before the Aliyah, in faith, in relationships, in female strength, in pain, in scars and in silence. But from the first moment I wanted the readers to meet her as a whole woman: a woman with a body, memory, desire, loss, faith, anger, longing and a voice that wants to be heard.

I wanted her to be seen as a woman who bears the question of what happens when fate and choice collide. A woman who lives in the tension between faith and pain. A woman who learns what a voice is in a world that teaches her to be silent. A woman who moves between the dictates of society and her inner truth.

Nagasti’s questions grow out of a very specific place, but they don’t just stay there. They are questions of many women: how do you continue after a loss? How do we stay true to ourselves within a home, family, community and tradition? Where is the line between acceptance and self-renunciation? And how does a woman find her voice when she has learned for years to protect herself precisely through silence?

The transition where she started breathing

There are moments in writing when a character ceases to be an idea and begins to breathe. For me, one of those moments revolved around Nagasti’s transition from her childhood home to her new life after her marriage.

This is a moment of threshold. A moment when a young woman separates from the world she knows and enters another house, another family, other rules, other looks. She does not leave behind only a geographical place. She leaves a version of herself.

I wanted to understand what happens to a woman inside at a moment like this. What happens to her body, to her silence, to the way she suddenly realizes that her life does not belong to her alone. What happens when she has to relearn her place in the world, not through big words, but through looks, roles, expectations and unwritten boundaries.

It was there that Nagasti began to become clear to me. Not as a heroine moving within a plot, but as a woman crossing a threshold. And every woman who has crossed a threshold in her life – wedding, birth, loss, migration, separation, change or a new beginning – knows that a threshold is not just a transition from one place to another. It is a moment when you need to understand who you will be on the other side.

Between silence and sound

One of Nagasti’s deepest conflicts is the tension between silence and voice. Not simple silence, not simple voice.

In her world, silence can be a tool of survival. A way to maintain dignity. A way not to aggravate pain. A way to protect something fragile. But that silence can also imprison. It can alienate a woman from herself, turn pain into a thing that has no language, and make her live a whole life with her truth remaining inside.

Nagasti also moves between fate and choice. There are things that are imposed on her by the force of time, society, family and circumstances. But in all these she has moments of choice. Sometimes very small, almost invisible. Still, these are the moments when a woman begins to regain ownership of her life.

It also ranges between faith and pain. To me, this is one of the most human places in her character. Faith does not erase pain. Sometimes she lives next to him. Sometimes she struggles with it. Sometimes she leans on him. Nagasti does not believe because life was easy for her. She believes in a life that has often confronted her with abysses.

Why was it important for me to write it now?

Many times the story of the Beta Israel community is told through the drama of the journey to Israel: the road, Sudan, the danger, the persecutions, the heroism. This is an important and defining story, but it is not the whole story.

Before the journey there was life.

There were Jewish villages in Ethiopia. There were houses. There were women. There were relationships, loves, jealousy, wisdom, pain, births, losses, faith, silence and deep community resilience. There were women who lived their whole lives without asking for recognition, without being written about, and without anyone putting them in the center of the stage.

Nagasti is my key to this door. Through her I could enter the world before the immigration not as a historical explanation, but as real life. Through her eyes, her body, her pain, her choices and the way she keeps walking, you can see a whole world that has remained too long on the sidelines of the story.

When I write it, I’m not just writing a novel. I keep a promise: to restore depth to a story that has been told too many times from the outside. To give space to women who were not always heard, but without them no story would last.

The figure that refused to remain transparent

The heroine of the story, Nagasti, refused to remain transparent. Not in the sense that she shouts to be seen, but in a deeper sense: her very existence as a complete, complex character with an inner world is a refusal to remain on the margins.

She is not just a mother. is not just a wife. is not just a member of the community. Is not just a woman who has been through pain. She is a woman with memory, desire, faith, anger, longing, nobility and a wound. A woman who cannot be reduced to one role or one story.

And that, in my eyes, is the strength of the literary. He can take a seemingly “marginal” character within a big story, and show that she is a whole world in herself. He can restore a face, body and voice to women that history has not always known how to see.

Nagasti reminds each of us to ask: What inside me is bigger than the story they told about me? What voice is waiting to break out of the protected silence I adopted for myself? And women in my family carried a whole world without me knowing to ask them in time?

What Nagasti wants to remind us

In the end, Nagasti was born from my memory, but she doesn’t just stay there. She is a literary character, but she was born from the deepest truth I know: women carry the world.

I invite the readers to meet her between the pages of the book not only to read about “history”, but also to meet something of themselves. You are the woman who has been too silent. You are the one who lost and moved on. You are the one who carried pain without calling it by name. You are the one who learned to be strong, but still asks for a place to be whole.

Nagasti reminds us that our scars are not just signs of pain. They are also a living testimony of what survived. They remind us of the women in our family, the untold stories, and the voice that maybe it’s time to give it back its rightful place.

Because Nagasti is one character. But there are many women behind her. Women who carried an entire world, even when no one asked them to tell how they did it.

Get to know Nagasti up close

This article is a gateway to the world of “A scarred stone” – a novel about women, roots, memory and the courage to take a place.

הפוסט How was Nagasti born? The figure that refused to remain transparent הופיע לראשונה ב-Fentay Maharat-Alamu.