Judie Oron is a Canadian/Israeli journalist who was born in Montreal, moved to Israel in 1967 and returned to Canada in 2004. She was a feature writer at ‘The Jerusalem Post,’ including a four year stint as a weekly columnist. Later, she directed the newspaper’s charitable Funds, including ‘Operation Homecoming,’ for Ethiopian Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel via a secret airlift code named Operation Moses. Along with her sons, Judie raised two Ethiopian Jewish girls, one of whom she encountered in Ethiopia in 1989. In 1992, upon discovering that the child's older sister was missing, she went alone to war-ravaged Ethiopia to release the girl from slavery and take her into her family. ‘Cry of the Giraffe,’ based on her daughter’s years in captivity, was published in August, 2010, by Annick Press.

“I paid cash and was handed a human being. That experience changed my life,” Judie explains. Since publication, she has been speaking out about child slavery, bride kidnapping and obstetric fistula, in English and in Hebrew, on three continents, in hopes of driving these tragic circumstances onto a wider public consciousness.  “Wuditu was trapped into a form of slavery we would call debt bondage,” Judie explains. “My current novel project is focussed on another form of slavery wide-spread in Ethiopia, bride kidnapping.”

Judie is a passionate lecturer, in English and Hebrew, and can be reached at: faranjit@yahoo.com.