Sigd 2026: White Robes and Ancient Prayers Fill Jerusalem Once More
Thousands of Beta Israel gathered above Jerusalem’s Old City to mark Sigd, while refugees in Juba prayed the same prayer far from home.
Kessim in white turbans and embroidered robes lead Sigd prayers in Jerusalem (Photo: Jerusalem Post)
ON MONDAY, 9 November, the white umbrellas rose again over Jerusalem. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews of the Beta Israel community climbed to the Armon Hanatziv Promenade, the ridge that looks across to the Old City, to mark Sigd, the festival that falls fifty days after Yom Kippur, on the 29th of Cheshvan.
From a raised platform, the Kessim, the community’s spiritual leaders, robed in white, led the prayers in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopian Jewry. Their readings came from Exodus, Deuteronomy and the book of Nehemiah, which tells how the people gathered in Jerusalem after the exile to renew their covenant with Hashem. Many in the crowd, also dressed in white, had fasted since morning, and broke their fast in the afternoon once the prayers were done.
For centuries in Ethiopia, Sigd was a day of longing. Communities climbed a mountain, fasted and prayed to be returned to Jerusalem. Today, with about 180,000 Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, that prayer is said within sight of the city itself, the turning of hope into homecoming that African Jewish Voices captured last year in Ancient Roots, Modern Celebration: Sigd Observed in Jerusalem.
“There is good integration today, blessed be God,” Kes Michael Maharat told the Associated Press. Yet his thoughts also turned to those not yet home. A small number of Ethiopian Jews remain in Ethiopia, held back by bureaucratic obstacles, and he expressed hope that they too will one day be able to make aliyah.
Far from the promenade, the same ancient prayer rose with no view of Jerusalem at all. On the outskirts of Juba, South Sudan, a small community of Ethiopian Jewish refugees also marked Sigd. Their road began in West Wolega, Oromia, where their synagogue and homes were burned in 2021. They fled on foot, only to find themselves trapped in Sudan when war broke out there in April 2023, before crossing once more into South Sudan. Just last month, in a covenant in exile, these Ethiopian Jewish refugees celebrated a Brit Milah in Juba, welcoming baby Levi on his eighth day. For them, Sigd’s longing for Jerusalem is no memory of the past. It is a prayer still waiting to be answered.
Yet the story of Ethiopian Jewry in Africa is not only one of exile. In December 2022, on the Shabbat before Hanukkah, an Ethiopian delegation joined Jews from ten African countries in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, for the Pan-African Jewish Conference organised by Kulanu. There, the Sub-Saharan African Jewish Alliance is born, and Ethiopia was part of it from the very first day. The country took its seat on the new alliance’s board and received a Torah scroll from Kulanu, while Abere Teshome of Bet Shalom in Kechene, Addis Ababa, helped bring SAJA to life. As SAJA approaches its fourth anniversary, the Beta Israel congregations of Addis Ababa remain part of a growing network of Jewish communities across the continent, proof that their story is still being written in Africa as well as in Israel.
A holiday for all Israel
The promenade held every generation. Elders who remember Sigd on Ethiopian hilltops stood beside young Israeli-born men and women. “I’m not the most religious person, but I honor my roots,” a young father named Yitzhak told The Jerusalem Post. Volunteers handed out flowers as a gesture of unity, and a high school teacher brought a group of non-Ethiopian students to watch the prayers as part of a sociology project.
Shoshana Ben-Dor, a researcher of Ethiopian Jewish traditions and former Israel director of the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, said Sigd is “much, much more” than a day of prayer. “I absolutely believe that this is a holiday that should be observed by all,” she said. One participant told Israel’s Channel 14 the same thing in his own words: Sigd is “not just a holiday for Ethiopians, but a holiday for the entire Jewish people.” The Knesset made Sigd a national holiday in 2008.
For Jewish communities across Africa, many of whom still pray toward a Jerusalem they have never seen, Sigd carries a message that needs no translation. The prayer of a people far from home, repeated on mountaintops for generations, can one day be answered on the hills of Jerusalem itself.
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