Sigd is the festival that belongs to Beta Israel alone. Held on the twenty-ninth of Cheshvan, fifty days after Yom Kippur, it is a renewal of the covenant: the community fasted, climbed a hill, and heard the kessoch read from the Orit, in a deliberate re-enactment of the assembly at which Ezra and Nehemiah read the law to the returned exiles. The ascent mattered, because the community was not in Jerusalem and the hill stood in for it. In Israel the festival is now kept in Jerusalem itself, which changes its meaning considerably, and since 2008 it has been a national holiday.
The departure from Ethiopia happened in stages and under pressure. The Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, ruled in 1973 that Beta Israel were Jews and descendants of the tribe of Dan; the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbinate followed in 1975, and the Law of Return was applied to the community. Famine and the Ethiopian civil war then made emigration urgent. Operation Moses brought several thousand people out through Sudan in 1984 and 1985, at considerable cost in lives on the walk. Operation Solomon, in May 1991, moved more than fourteen thousand people to Israel in thirty-six hours as the Mengistu government collapsed.
The questions that followed have not closed. The rabbinate initially required a symbolic conversion of arrivals, which the community experienced as a denial of the recognition it had been given, and the requirement was resisted and largely dropped. The authority of the kessoch, whose training and function do not map onto the rabbinate, has been eroded. And the status of the Falash Mura, descendants of Beta Israel who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and who have sought to return, is decided case by case and remains contested in Israeli politics.