Yityish Aynaw, the First Ethiopian-Born Miss Israel

Yityish “Titi” Aynaw was born in Ethiopia’s Gondar Province to a family belonging to the Beta Israel community, Ethiopian Jews with a religious and cultural lineage tracing back centuries. Her mother died when Aynaw was young, and at age 12 she moved to Israel to live with her grandparents, part of the broader waves of Ethiopian Jewish migration to Israel, known as aliyah, that brought tens of thousands of Beta Israel community members to the country in successive movements from the 1980s onward.

Aynaw had no modeling background and was entered into the Miss Israel competition by a friend rather than pursuing the pageant circuit herself. She won the 2013 title at age 21, becoming both the first Ethiopian-born woman and the first Black woman to hold the Miss Israel crown in the pageant’s history, a milestone that drew significant domestic and international coverage given Ethiopian-Israelis’ documented, ongoing struggles with discrimination and unequal treatment within Israeli society. Coverage of her win credited her composed public presence and her outspoken commitment to improving race relations within Israel as central to the judges’ decision.

Her win carried consequences beyond the pageant stage. Aynaw was invited to a gala attended by then-US President Barack Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres, and the Jerusalem Post named her among the year’s most influential Jewish figures for 2013. She used the visibility that followed to advocate specifically for Ethiopian-Israeli communities, whose members have long reported facing housing, employment and educational discrimination despite their formal citizenship and religious standing within the state.

That advocacy took concrete institutional form through the “Titi Project,” which Aynaw founded to provide extracurricular educational and enrichment activities for disadvantaged Ethiopian-Israeli youth in the coastal city of Netanya, home to one of Israel’s larger Ethiopian-Israeli communities. The project extended her platform well past the typical shelf life of a beauty-pageant title, turning a single historic win into an ongoing effort aimed at the same community whose broader challenges her own visibility had helped bring into sharper public view.