Worlds Apart, Human at Heart: Reflections of an Israeli Who Came from the Diaspora in Ethiopia with JDC Entwine

posted January 12, 2026 by Eli Domoshnitsky

I was born in the former Soviet Union and brought to Israel as a toddler in 1990. My parents arrived with almost nothing; They had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to rebuild a new identity from scratch. Growing up, I understood Israel as both a refuge and a responsibility carrying with me a sense of gratitude and the duty to protect and contribute to the country that gave my family a future. 

Ethiopia is unlike anywhere else. Ancient, proud, spiritually saturated, and full of quiet resilience. A country never colonized, whose people carry themselves with a kind of grounded dignity that comes from defining their own story. It is also a place tied – sometimes in forgotten ways – to Jewish memory: the legacy of Beta Israel, the echoes of Sheba and Solomon, the sense that Jewish history has always touched Africa in ways we rarely acknowledge. Standing there, while traveling on Inside Ethiopia with JDC Entwine, I found myself thinking that the world shifts, borders change, empires rise and fall, but the essence of human experience repeats in every generation. That idea stayed with me throughout the trip.

At a clinic supported by JDC and run by legendary Dr. Rick Hodes, we met a mother waiting with her daughter for news about a delayed back surgery. She had traveled far and realized she would have to wait even longer. The way she handled her daughter – protective, patient, exhausted and teary eyed – instantly brought me back to thoughts of my own mother when we arrived in Israel: anxious but determined, doing everything she could to give her children a chance at something better. I didn’t need Amharic to understand it. Motherhood is universal.

Later that day, we met a man who had walked nine days to reach that same clinic. His shoes had disintegrated along the way. He had tried every closer option and finally decided that walking was the only path left. His determination stirred something I recognized in people I’ve met throughout the years: the raw, instinctive refusal to give up. The will to live. The courage to endure. I’ve seen it in Israelis facing danger, and here it was again, in a completely different world, yet fundamentally the same.

Then there were the farmers. With support from JDC’s GRID initiative, they were incorporating basic Israeli drip irrigation and receiving agricultural guidance that helped them triple their yield. Generations had grown the same crops because that was simply what they grew. Now, with modest tools, they are transforming their economic future. It reminded me how many families’ fates turn on small details: a visa, a decision to leave, a fragile hope packed into a suitcase.

JDC’s work there embodies something deeply Jewish: the idea that our responsibility extends beyond our own borders. That “tikkun olam” is not only rhetoric. As the Torah teaches: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” – “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” Pursue – not observe. Pursue – not selectively, but as an active way of being. Watching JDC’s teams quietly, consistently empower communities, not with charity but with dignity, felt like witnessing Jewish values made real. It reminded me that Israel’s strength, and the strength of the Jewish people, is not measured only in defense or innovation, but in compassion and responsibility. I realized that my life is one thread in a vast tapestry stretching across generations and continents. Ethiopia made that tapestry feel more visible. My parents left the USSR to build a better life. Israel gave us a home. And now, in Ethiopia, I saw that our story is part of a much larger human story.

Ethiopia and Israel may be worlds apart. Our histories diverge, our challenges differ, our realities do not mirror each other. But in the mother worrying for her daughter, in the man who walked for survival, in farmers planting hope into the soil, I saw a reflection of every place I’ve been and of myself.
And that is the lesson I carried home: No matter how many borders we cross or how many landscapes we witness, we are worlds apart, yet human at heart.