A Priesthood Under Pressure in a New Setting

The kessoch's standing has faced real strain since large-scale Beta Israel emigration to Israel from the 1980s onward, a change the Encyclopaedia Judaica documents in detail. Israel's Chief Rabbinate, having recognised Beta Israel as Jewish in 1973 and 1975, did not extend the kessoch equivalent standing to Israel's own rabbinate for functions such as officiating marriages recognised by the state, so many communal life-cycle roles the kessoch had performed in Ethiopia passed to state-recognised rabbis instead, some of them themselves of Ethiopian Jewish descent trained in Israeli rabbinical institutions. Kaplan's history records that this shift has produced real generational tension within the community, older kessoch and their traditional standing coexisting with a younger generation increasingly formed by mainstream Israeli rabbinic education, a change in where religious authority is trained and formally recognised rather than in what the kessoch have always taught. Quirin's account notes that the kessoch nonetheless remain active religious figures within Ethiopian Israeli community life, respected for a role and a form of training no rabbinical seminary duplicates, so the office has persisted as a living institution even as the range of functions Israeli law formally recognises it for has narrowed since the community's arrival.