Director of Ono’s Ethiopian Center is Scholar in Residence in Baltimore Synagogue
Rabbi Dr. Sharon Shalom, founder and director of Ono Academic College’s International Center for the Study of Ethiopian Jewry served as the Scholar-in-Residence at Baltimore’s Congregation Beth Tfiloh where he gave multiple lectures about a wide-range of subjects including: his personal story of Aliya from Ethiopia to Israel, the October 7th attacks, his recent work serving as a Casualty Care Officer in the IDF, Antisemitism in the US and around the world, the trauma gripping Jews everywhere and other subjects. Rabbi Dr. Shalom met with local spiritual leaders including:
- Rabbi Chai Posner
- Rabbi Eli Yoggev
- Rabbi Jason Goldstein
Rabbi Dr. Shalom also spoke for an hour with the synagogue’s 200 school children in an address that local teachers said kept their attention better than any other lecture in recent memory. Rabbi Dr. Sharon distributed copies of “My Family,” a curriculum for teaching English-speaking 9th and 10th graders about the history, theology, culture and practice of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewry).
In one of his lectures, trying find an explanation for the incomprehensible support that many around the world were giving to Hamas, Rabbi Dr. Shalom noted a distinction he frequently makes in his scholarship, between the simplified “identification” that looks from the outside only at the most superficial traits, and “identity” which is gets at the deeper ways in which people define themselves. He hoped that a greater focus on “identity” over “identification” might clarify some of the grotesque moral failings of our time.
