WE EIRE
mays
BUYING
vint Distribution Committee's
Brookdale Institute earlier this
year indicated the level of un-
employment amongst Ethiopi-
ans (in five cities and towns
surveyed) ranges between 1 and
7 percent. However, Mica Oden-
heimer, the American-born pres-
ident of the Israeli Association
for Ethiopian Jews, sees a bleak
\ future for the children of subsis-
tence farmers.
Mr. Odenheimer's organiza-
tion runs a "drop-in center" in Tel
Aviv which is visited by hun-
dreds of what he claims are the
1,000 Ethiopians under the age
of 18 who have dropped out of
formal educational frameworks.
To date, the absorption policy
affecting those who arrived dur-
\_ipg and since Operation Solomon
/-fias been to first seek employ-
ment for Ethiopians in tempo-
rary housing and later to train
them during their transition to
permanent housing.
Mr. Odenheimer cites veter-
an Israeli-run grocery stores in
caravan sites as missed oppor-
tunities to train Ethiopians with
retailing skills to serve the gen-
public and not just their own
7-parochial consumer patterns. To
his mind, the major bather to the
economic advancement of even
the most successful Ethiopian
entrepreneurs is that the prod-
ucts and services they tend to
supply cater mainly to their own
community, which has little, if
any, disposable income.
Most Ethiopian Jews were
\–originally subsistence farmers —
"an occupation they have not pur-
sued in Israel because it is usu-
ally associated with secular
kibbutzim or capital-intensive
moshavim. In addition, in an in-
dustrialized society their craft
making skills are generally not
needed for making utilitarian
wares.
Gadi Germi, who runs the
'\--Ethiopian desk at the Netanya
'Business Development Center,
says categorically all the busi-
nesses he has seen are based on
the demands of the community,
ranging from selling black-hair
products and other niche con-
sumer goods to people seeking
loans to buy a van to transport
members of the community to
\_ and from remote caravan sites.
2 He says there are 30
Ethiopian entrepreneurs who
operate independent businesses
throughout the country.
Mass-appeal restaurants,
which have generated success-
ful business for nearly every oth-
er immigrant group, have all
failed. The major factors missing
in order for such ventures to suc-
ceed, according to Zvika Rubin-
stein, head of the Netanya
Center, is the absence of signif-
icant start-up capital and man-
agement skills — in other words,
everything. Mr. Rubinstein re-
SUPERHIGHWAY page 60
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1-696 AT VAN DYKE
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59