Adisu Massala

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Adisu Massala was a member of the Israeli Knesset for the Israeli Labor Party.

A Black Jew, and a former member of the Labor Party, he was the first Ethiopian member of the Knesset.

Massala has been the Ethiopian Jews' greatest champion. Ever since walking out of Ethiopia across the Sudanese desert to a plane bound for Israel in 1980, he has been at the forefront of every demonstration for Ethiopian immigrant rights.

He chairs the United Ethiopian Jewish Organization -- the umbrella group for all Ethiopian rights groups.

[edit] Views on education

The school dropout rate for Ethiopian Jews is higher than that of the Jewish population at large, according to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee-Brookdale Research Institute. Eighteen percent of Ethiopians age 14-17 either drop out or attend school irregularly.

Massala blames the dropout rate on an educational system that places a large number of the Ethiopian students into religious schools, whether or not they are religious, and into poor-quality boarding schools.

Additionally, he described a problem with the language instruction:

"Reading comprehension is a problem.... Common sense indicates that the great difference in culture and codes has implications for language learning," Masala said. "But the teaching method is uniform and identical for all groups of immigrants. The program doesn't take into account the culture and traditions of one community or another." [1]