Last week, the Jewish affairs weekly, The Forward, reported that a leading Conservative rabbi in Israel was charging two Orthodox kibbutzim in Israel with discrimination after they refused to admit two Ugandan Jews to their Hebrew language programs. The director of the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, Rabbi Andrew Sacks, alleged that the two East Africans -- members of the Abayudaya community of 600 Ugandans whose forefathers embraced Judaism in 1919 -- were not allowed into the classes because they were black. "We have had a myriad of problems with the Interior Ministry in regards to persons of color," Sacks stated. "Virtually every Conservative convert that was a person of color was immediately suspect."

The incident sparked a lively discussion in Israeli newspapers about race and discrimination in Israeli society, and about the increasing, well "blackness" of African Jews in Israel. At the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, in an area known locally as Little Africa, one often sees Ethiopian Jewish teenagers milling around, sporting baggy jeans, Kangol hats, sports jerseys, voguish hairstyles - African braids, Rastafarian dreads, bald heads - and the occasional yarmulke. The Ethiopian youth, many of whom are often suspected of petty crime and drug use, are an indicator to many social critics that Israel is developing a new kind of underclass. They're also another example of how marginalized, disaffected youth of color the world over increasingly look towards African Americans, American black culture and the Civil Rights struggle when trying to make sense of their own predicaments.

http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Racecard/ugandan_jews.htm