Long before she was a professional chef and restaurateur, Ethiopia-born Israeli-raised Beejhy Barhany would hold Shabbat dinners in her New York apartment for anyone who wanted to eat. “On Friday night, there was always food at Beejhy’s,” she recalls.
At every one of her Friday night dinners, guests would enjoy some traditional yemarina yewotet dabo – the Ethiopian honey-and-milk-bread equivalent to challah. And Barhany will be demonstrating how to make it at this year’s Limmud.
Barhany can remember the excitement of being a seven-year-old girl making the three-year exodus from her birth country to Israel back in 1983.
“It was exciting going to the promised land, to Jerusalem, the land of our forefathers, where we could unite with our fellow Jews from all over the world. And with that idealism, people did whatever it took to fulfil it. They left all their belonging, their homes, their land.”
Such was the determination to be in Israel, it took her family three years to make Aliyah, the epic journey including a lengthy stay in Sudan. From there, a cousin who worked with the Mossad eventually arranged transport to Israel, and they drove from Sudan to Kenya, Uganda and Europe before flying to Israel.
“We made it to Israel,” she says. “It was a dream come true for everybody.”
Even before she made it to the promised land, Barhany was helping her mother, grandmother and aunts with food preparation, gradually learning the various techniques, the wonders of hospitality, generosity and tradition. Cooking and hospitality, she says, are attributes with which she “was born”.
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