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Sigd, the Ethiopian Jewish Holiday,
Diff ers Across Generations, Locations
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
Courtesy of Penn Hillel
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
F or many Jews, the evening of Nov.

22 is just a quiet Tuesday night, but
for Ethiopian Jews in Israel and
the Diaspora, Nov. 22 is the beginning
of Sigd, a pilgrimage holiday holy to the
Beta Israel community.

Celebrated 50 days aft er Yom Kippur
on the 29th day of Cheshvan, Sigd is the
commemoration of the day God was
revealed to Moses and means “worship”
or “prostration” in the Ethiopian liturgi-
cal language of Ge’ez, according to My
Jewish Learning.

Living in isolation from other Jewish
communities, Ethiopian Jews observe
Sigd as a longing to visit Israel and the
Temple. However, from the 1970s to the
early 2000s, following a coup d’etat in
Ethiopia, Israel began airlift ing Ethiopian
Jews to Israel. As of 2021, more than
160,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel,
according to the Israel Central Bureau of
Statistics. With more Beta Israel living in their
promised land or immigrating to the
United States, the holiday of Sigd, once
representing a yearning of a singular,
isolated people, has come to be celebrated
in a multitude of ways, largely depending
on the age and location of the person
celebrating. Th ough the holiday’s origins are
unclear — there’s some documentation
to suggest it began in the sixth century
following a Jewish-Christian war and
other accounts dating to a religious war
in the 1400s, according to the Museum
of the Jewish People — Sigd is typically
celebrated with prayers, fasting and an
evening break fast.

In Ethiopia, Jews don white and ascend
a mountain, symbolizing a similar ascent
of the Israelites up Mount Sinai. Th is
tradition is one of the few memories
Sigal Kanotopsky, Lower Merion resident
and Northeast regional director for the
Jewish Agency for Israel, has of her home
country before she arrived in Israel at
age 5.

“If Yom Kippur is about individual
aspects or focused on individuals, then
Mari Beza is an Ethiopian Jew and
Israel fellow at Penn Hillel.

[Sigd] is a communal Yom Kippur,”
Kanotopsky said. “Meaning, you com-
bine eff orts, community eff orts, with a
day of purity, prayers and yearning and
longing to our desire for Zion and to
really unite with our brothers and sisters
in Jerusalem.”
As a child, the yearning Kanotopsky
and her family felt to arrive in Jerusalem
was literal. Today, however, for many Beta
Israel in Israel, the holiday has taken on a
more metaphorical signifi cance.

“In a way, while our dream of getting
to the geographical Jerusalem and the
physical Jerusalem came true, I think
we are still in the process, and we have
a great [amount] to do to get to the con-
ceptual Jerusalem of living in a healthy
and reformed society that is accepting
of everyone, and everyone has his or her
own place in the mosaic in society or in
world Jewry.”
Israel began recognizing Sigd as a
national holiday in 2008 aft er decades
of only tenuously accepting the infl ux of
Ethiopian refugees. National acknowl-
edgment of Sigd represented a step in
embracing Beta Israel and marked a shift
in the tone of the holiday.

Mari Beza, University of Pennsylvania
Hillel’s Israel fellow, has spent 22 of her
An Ethiopian Jewish Kes, or high priest, celebrating Sigd in Israel
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