The Orit Scroll of Kes Abba Yitzhak Aysu

Kes Abba Yitzhak Aysu served the Beta Israel community of Ethiopia's Tigray region as an ordained spiritual leader for decades, reading aloud from a manuscript of the Orit, the community's most sacred text, that had already passed through several of his predecessors before it reached him. Handwritten in Ge'ez on parchment, bound between wooden covers, the manuscript held the Five Books of Moses together with Joshua, Judges and Ruth, the eight books that make up Beta Israel scripture, plus genealogical material and a text called The Life of Moses that an earlier owner had added to it.

Kes Abba Yitzhak died in 1995 holding a conviction he never saw realized in his own lifetime: that the Orit's true home was the Land of Israel. His family carried that conviction forward, and in 2017, more than two decades after his death, they donated the manuscript to the National Library of Israel, fulfilling a wish that had outlived the man who held it.

The manuscript did not simply go into storage. In May 2025 it went on public display at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, as part of a documentation program that treats manuscripts like this one not as relics of a closed chapter but as living evidence of an unbroken chain of readers, copyists and caretakers stretching from a nineteenth century acquisition to a twenty-first century exhibition case.

A natural worry attaches to any project that gathers a community's sacred manuscripts into a national library: that the objects, once catalogued and photographed by outsiders, effectively leave the community that has always read them. The National Library of Israel's program around Beta Israel sacred texts, of which the Orit Scroll of Kes Abba Yitzhak Aysu is one documented example, was built to avoid exactly that outcome.

The library's own digitization initiative, run in partnership with Tel Aviv University's Department of Biblical Studies and the Koret Center for Jewish Civilization, works from a specific principle: manuscripts get high resolution digital scans made freely available online, while the physical originals mostly stay with the families and Kessim, the community's ordained priests, who have always held them. The Kes Abba Yitzhak manuscript, already donated outright to the library, is something of an exception within the program rather than its model case.

What the broader effort documents is not a single object but a living practice. Seventeen manuscripts recorded in one recent workshop alone ranged from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, evidence that the Orit has been copied, corrected and carried forward by named individuals for half a millennium rather than frozen at some single ancient point. A digitization project can make that history visible without asking anyone to give up the book they still read from.