Israel is only 65 years old, but the Miss Israel pageant has occurred each of the past 63 years. Aynaw is the first Ethiopian to win the pageant. She made a significant impression on judges (and the world, obviously) when she told them she should win because it was time for a black woman to hold the title.
Her crowning in February came amidst ongoing protests of discrimination against Israel's Ethiopian community. In January of this year, Israeli officials admitted to administering contraceptive shots to Ethiopian women without their consent, which many activists blame for the 50% decline in the Israeli Ethiopian community's birthrate.
Thousands of Ethiopians were airlifted to Israel in 1984 and 1991 to escape civil war, but Aynaw's grandparents moved there in 2000. She went to live with them in March 2003 at age 12 following the death of her mother, who had become suddenly ill (her father passed away when she was a year old, but she doesn't know of what causes).
When she got to Israel, Aynaw didn't speak a word of Hebrew, but she became fluent in it at her Jewish boarding school in Haifa. In an excellent recent profile of the beauty queen, Tablet describes her Hebrew now as "accentless and expressive." Though pageant contestants typically compete using Hebrew names, Aynaw chose not to. "Yitayish" translates to "look," or "looking toward the future," Aynaw told Tablet — in Amharic.
On Thursday, Aynaw met President Obama at the state dinner hosted by Israel's president Shimon Peres.
Source: tumblr.com
The White House invited her upon learning she was the first black immigrant to win the Miss Israel title.
Aynaw told the BBC, "I was influenced and inspired by Obama. Like him, I was also raised by my grandmother. Nothing was handed to me on a plate, and like him I also had to work very hard and long to achieve things in my life. To this day he inspires me just as he inspires the rest of the world."
Source: Buzzfeed.com, 3/22/2013
