400 Miles to Freedom

Streaming video - 2015

"That night I just remember running. No time to catch your breath, just running, because you want to be gone from the village before the sun comes up." -Avishai Mekonen, 400 MILES TO FREEDOM. In 1984, the Beta Israel, a secluded 2,500-year-old community of observant Jews in the northern Ethiopian mountains, fled a dictatorship and began a secret and dangerous journey of escape. Co-director Avishai Mekonen, then 10 years old, was among them. In this film, he breaks his 20-year silence about the brutal kidnapping he endured as a child in Sudan during his community's exodus out of Africa. This life-defining event launches an inquiry into identity, leading him to African, Asian and Latino Jews in Israel and the U.S. In Hebrew, ...English and Aramaic with English subtitles. “Shari Rothfarb and Avishai Mekonen explore the exodus of Jews from Ethiopia to Israel through the story of Mekonen’s personal experience. Recommended.” – Video Librarian more