Ethiopian Jewish Woman, Mazi Pilip’s, Journey To Israel

Mazi Pilip is on the ballot for a spot in Congress. She is the Republican candidate for tomorrow’s special election after representative George Santos was ousted. The voters are from a “swing district” spanning Queens and Long Island that recently became primarily Republican in 2022 after 10 years of Democratic wins. With the recent attacks against Israel and the war following, the issue is a major focus of the campaign.

Pilip is naturally a strong advocate for Israel. She’s been a legislator in Nassau County since 2021. She was born in Ethiopia and evacuated to Israel at 12 during Operation Solomon, Israel’s 1991 mass airlift of Ethiopian Jews. She served in the IDF and later moved to New York. She’s married to a Ukranian-born Jewish American and gained citizenship in 2009. She’s also a mother of seven and Orthodox Jew.

To learn more about Pilip before this important vote, check out our interview with her here.

Mazi Pilip is a county legislator in Nassau County. She and Allison connected at an End Jew Hatred event. Ethiopian-born, Mazi was a participant in Operation Solomon (1991) as a child, which airlifted 14,000 Ethiopian Jews in jumbo jets to Israel. She moved to the United States in adulthood.

Ethiopian Jews have a rich history spanning thousands of years, as one of the lost tribes. Only in the late 1900s did many of them finally achieve the dream of their forefathers to ascend to Jerusalem.

Many Ethiopian Jews participated in Operation Moses (1984-5), in which they made their way to Sudan and were airlifted covertly by Israeli air transport. They walked from Ethiopia to Sudan, traveling for months with very little food and water, hoping that someone would pick them up and finally bring them home.

All these Jews, so eager to go to the Holy Land, barely any knowledge of what Jersalem actually was: all they knew was what had been passed down through the community, and they had never seen a photograph of the city.  

Join us as Mazi regales listeners about her family’s arrival to Israel and her experiences as an Ethiopian Jew in both Israel and America.

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