After Father’s Death, Ethiopian-Israeli Family Fights Deportation
The Getahon family in Rishon Lezion. Geffen sits left to her grandfather who is holding a picture of her late father.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
Geffen loves to study math and play with her friends. She lives in the central Israeli city of Rishon Letzion, is in second grade and has a captivating smile. In Hebrew, her name means “grapevine.” In July, after the school year comes to an end, Geffen is scheduled to leave Israel with her mother Maza, an Ethiopian citizen Israel wants to deport – even though her daughter is an Israeli citizen, because her father was too.
Geffen’s father, Natan Getahon, died in 2019 shortly after Geffen’s mother began the process for receiving legal residency status in Israel. The process was halted when Getahon died, and the humanitarian committee of the Population, Immigration and Border Authority in the Interior Ministry did not accept the mother’s request to remain in Israel with her daughter after the death of her husband.
“The damage that will be caused, as far as any will be caused, is small,” a Population and Immigration Authority representative told the appeal’s tribunal in the Justice Ministry that reviews decisions made by the Population Authority. Half of Geffen’s short life was spent in Ethiopia with her mother’s family, which raised her when she was an infant, said the representative. But Geffen also has a large family in Israel that warmly supports her and her mother, and who are prepared to fight to keep them in Israel.
“I’m shocked by the situation,” Atkacho (Aryeh) Getahon, Natan’s brother, told a judge on the appeals panel at a hearing held last year in Jerusalem concerning his sister-in-law’s deportation. “I ask myself, how are we treating this matter in general. The child has siblings, we are a family that lives together, I understand the state’s considerations, and I served the country. Now I feel they have shot me in the chest. They want to take my niece and throw her onto a remote island.”
Geffen’s story was first reported by Army Radio and since then the Israeli organization Zazim – Community in Action has begun raising awareness to put a stop to the deportation order. The group and the Getahon are hoping that the case of Danielle Lev, the daughter of an Israeli father and a Thai mother, will serve as precedent. Former Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked allowed Danielle’s mother, after her father died, to remain in Israel after a determined public struggle. The Getahon family also plans on sending Interior Minister Moshe Arbel a personal message on the matter this week.
Getahon told Haaretz that the humanitarian committee’s decision was like a punch to the face for him. “We are a down to earth family, we went through a lot on the way to our promised land, we walked hundreds of kilometers to get here. My brother, Geffen’s father, saved us from death in Sudan. I am obligated to do everything to help his daughter. But it doesn’t interest the state, and they didn’t give it any weight.”
Natan met Maza through mutual friends in Ethiopia in 2013 when he went for a visit. He was an activist in the Ethiopian community, edited a book on the immigration of Ethiopian Jewry and worked in the field of immigrant absorption. Natan went to Ethiopia a few times to visit Maza, and he found out she was pregnant when he was in Israel. Because he was helping to take care of his mother, who was ill with cancer, Natan was unable to travel to Ethiopia to be with Maza.
Geffen was born in November 2014 and Natan was in daily contact with them, said his family. In 2016, Natan was once again able to visit Ethiopia in order to arrange the documentation needed for marriage, and he and Maza married that year. Natan submitted a request for Israel to grant Maza and Geffen residency status and citizenship according to the regulations on granting such status to a foreigner married to an Israeli citizen. One year later, after several bureaucratic hurdles, Maza was allowed to enter Israel, at first for six months and later for a year.
A year after Maza arrived in Israel, and after she began the process for receiving permanent residency status, they brought Geffen to Israel too, who was being raised by Maza’s family in Ethiopia. Less than half a year later, fate struck the family and Natan passed away. Maza turned to the Interior Ministry with a request to remain in Israel with her daughter. She was working in a factory and lived in a rented apartment in Rishon Letzion, and was in contact with her late husband’s family as well as with his children from a previous marriage. She asked to remain in Israel and raise Geffen here. In 2021, the humanitarian committee informed Maza that her request had been denied, and she must leave Israel.
As for Geffen, the humanitarian committee ruled she had spent half her life in Ethiopia, and only knew her father for half a year. In addition, her mother has no family, property or assets in Israel, but has good relations with her mother and five siblings in Ethiopia. The committee said their decision is in line with the good of the child, who could adapt to Ethiopia. “It is possible that the return of the minor to her mother’s country of origin will be for her benefit, there she can live alongside her mother’s family as she did until her arrival in Israel, and this is according to the principle that a minor is dependent on her parents and her parents are not dependent on her, and when in any case the minor’s rights as an Israeli citizen are preserved to fulfill them in the future according to her wishes,” states the committee’s ruling.
This was the stage at which Getahon and his brother realized they needed to take action and fight for their niece and sister-in-law to stay in Israel. The appeal they filed with the appeals’ tribunal was denied, and an administrative appeal they filed with the Jerusalem District Court was also denied by Judge Eli Abarbanel. The family’s lawyer understood from the court that he would not succeed in proving the Population Authority’s decision was flawed, instead focusing on receiving a longer period of time in preparation for Maza’s deportation. “A child does not grant permission to his parents,” said Batel Rehavi-Moriah, who represented the government in the hearing in February in the Jerusalem District Court.
“Geffen doesn’t deserve it, I don’t deserve it. To put such things in an eight and a half -year-old child’s head who lost her father, it’s too much,” Maza told Haaretz in the home of her husband’s father. The grandfather is especially close to Geffen, and on Friday afternoon Natan’s six siblings met in the grandfather’s apartment, along with their children and Geffen’s step-siblings. Most of them live next to each other in the Ramat Eliyahu neighborhood of Rishon Letzion.
“Geffen does not need to be sent backward, we need to let her go forward,” said Maza. “It hurts me a lot, I didn’t want to talk to her about the deportation. I truly thought we’d succeed in court. But I recently talked with her on the matter. She told me: ‘Mom, if this is my country, why did they tell me to go to Ethiopia?’ She is very smart. It was very hard for her to hear it.”
The family is now planning to submit a request to be allowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. “It’s hard to believe that the Interior Ministry is asking to deport a girl who’s an Israeli citizen, who experienced the loss of a Jewish Israeli father, to cut her off from all her family who are also citizens, and to send her to a third-world country that is in a crisis, while in doing so she will lose her Israeli citizenship too,” said Tomer Warsha, the attorney who recently began representing the family.
The Population, Immigration and Border Authority in the Interior Ministry said: “From an examination of the case, it was found that Geffen was born in Ethiopia in 2014 to a mother who is a citizen of Ethiopia, whose entire family lives in Ethiopia, and to an Israeli father, who married her and was registered as the girl’s father only two years after she was born. In 2017, the mother entered Israel for the time alone, with a tourist visa, and began the gradual process of receiving [residency] status in Israel, while her young daughter, Geffen, remained living with the extended family in Ethiopia for four years. Her daughter arrived in Israel only a year later, in 2018. About a year after the daughter entered Israel, in 2019, the Israeli father passed away. At this stage, the mother was at the beginning of the process, which was stopped with his death. The situation left the mother and her daughter in Israel by themselves, while her extended family resides in Ethiopia.”
“Appeals submitted by the mother, both to the appeals tribunal and to the District Court, were also denied and these courts adopted the position of the interministerial humanitarian committee and the Population and Immigration Authority, according to which the mother lived most of her in her country of origin and the child’s father was present in her life for a very short time before his death. It should be emphasized that Geffen is an Israeli citizen in every way, but nonetheless, as a minor she must accompany her mother, whose request was the one rejected. As a result, and while making it clear the mother would honor any decision of the court, the two of them were given time to prepare that allows the mother and her daughter enough time to leave Israel in an organized manner at the end of the current school year,” said the Population, Immigration and Border Authority in its response.
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