Ethiopian Jews panel touches questions of race, religion

j. - Ethiopian Jews� panel touches questions of race, religion: "If you�re presented with choices, such as being both black and Jewish, then who are you?�

This question, posed by Scott Rubin, was at the heart of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival�s panel discussion on Saturday, July 29 at Berkeley�s Roda Theatre. Rubin, a senior research associate at the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, was moderating a panel discussion on race, adoption and Jewish identity.
The discussion � sponsored by Be�chol Lashon, a program of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, which seeks to grow and strengthen the Jewish people through racial, ethnic and cultural inclusiveness � followed the screening of �Sisai,� a documentary about a young man�s journey from his adopted home and family in Israel to locate his long-lost father in their native Ethiopia.

The lesson that I learned from this experience is that you should not have secrets in your family,� Sisai Bayo, the star of the film who was in Berkeley for the screening, told the packed audience. �Make sure that your children know everything. Don�t hide anything from them.

Sisai, which was the winner of top documentary honors at last year�s Jerusalem International Film Festival, is a portrait of immigrants caught between two worlds. When Bayo wants to get married, he and his fianc�e can�t find a rabbi who will marry two Ethiopian Jews. Later, when he wants to tell his birth father about getting married under the chuppah, he realizes there�s no word for chuppah in Ethiopian.

Ethiopian Israeli filmmaker David Gavro, Bayo's older brother who said that the script came to me as I was filming took the film to Ethiopia last year, and Bayo�s birth father came"