The Israeli Interior Ministry has ruled that Africans from the Abayudaya community in Uganda who have converted to Judaism are not actually Jews and have no “right of return” to the Jewish ethnostate—unlike the racially-based claim of “Russian” oligarch Roman Abramovich who has just been granted citizenship of that state.

According to a report in the Israeli Haartez newspaper, the Israeli Interior Ministry has rejected an immigration request under Israel’s Nuremburg Laws-based “Law of Return” from a member of Abayudaya community, explaining that “this is a matter of principle regarding conversions in this community.”

This in effect means that the Israeli Interior Ministry has resolved not to grant recognition to the “Jewish community” of Uganda, Haaretz reported.

Its decision was revealed in a response to the first and only request thus far by a member of the 2,000-strong Ugandan Abayudaya community, who sought to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return.

The response, obtained by Haaretz, notes that the applicant’s “conversion is not recognized for the purpose of receiving status in Israel” and that, therefore, he must leave the country by June 14 or risk deportation.

When Haaretz asked the ministry about its decision, a spokesperson said, “This is a matter of principle regarding conversions in this community — it is not about one specific applicant.”

The application was submitted by Kibita Yosef, who has been living on Ketura — a kibbutz affiliated with the Conservative movement — over the past year.

The Abayudaya began practicing Judaism about 100 years ago, but were only officially “converted” in recent years. Although some Jews consider them to be genuine, the Israeli Interior Ministry has the final say on such matters.

This is not the first time that a black has been expelled from Israel after claiming to be a Jew. In February 2018, a convert from Kenya, who also claimed to be part of the Abayudaya community, was deported for the second time after failing to persuade the Jewish ethnostate that he was a Jew.

Yehudah Kimani had been accepted to study at a Conservative yeshiva — Jews-only schools for which the Ministry of Interior only approves student visas for individuals “if they can prove they are Jewish.”

Ministry of Interior spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said that the conversion of Yehudah Kimani was “not recognized” by the relevant authorities, and therefore, his application for a student visa was bound to be rejected.

* Israel’s famous “black Jews” — actually mixed-race individuals from Ethiopia — today number around 138,000.

They were brought to Israel from the 1980s onward, when the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the time, Ovadia Yosef, issued an official “ruling” declaring that they were Jews, and that they were descendants of the “lost tribe of Dan.”

Later DNA tests have shown that although the “Ethiopian Jews” (known in the Jewish ethnostate as “Beta Israel”) have a small element of Jewish genes, the overwhelming majority of their genetic makeup is not Jewish (“The population genetics of the Jewish people,” Ostrer, H., and Skoreck, K., Human Genetics, 2013 Feb; 132(2): 119–127).

Once science had proven that they weren’t actually Jews, the Israeli government quickly moved to halt all further “Ethiopian Jewish” immigration in 2015.

In 2012, it was revealed that Jewish doctors were widely administering the Depo-Provera birth control drug to “Ethiopian Jewesses” without their knowledge to reduce their birthrate, and a report on the conditions of “Ethiopian Jews” in 2005 revealed that at least 65 percent of those aged 45 or older were unemployed, and 18 percent of their families were headed by a single parent, as opposed to 8 percent in the population as a whole. The crime rate among the “Ethiopian Jews” community’s youth is climbing every year; at present it is three times the rate for all Israeli youth.