Married to fellow-immigrant Genet, a social worker due to give birth soon to their second child, Yitzhak attended his graduation ceremony yesterday at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's medical school in Beersheba. Currently doing his internship at nearby Soroka Hospital, he is due soon to start his military service as an IDF physician. Thereafter, he said in an interview, he wants to specialize, either in internal medicine or surgery.

Yitzhak arrived here alone three weeks before the famous Operation Solomon that brought 15,000 Ethiopian Jews in a mass airlift, and was one of the last in his family to immigrate. His father, who was an educator and head of the Addis branch of ORT, "had to leave" because of his pro-Israeli activity, and his four siblings had also arrived here in advance. His father, an Educational Ministry official, life here with his second wife and their daughter, who was born here, while Yitzhak's own mother remains in Addis.

After graduating with honors from a public high school in Ethiopia's capital, he went to university. Friends "dared" him to apply to medical school.

"I took the tests and did well. After getting into it, I fell in love with medicine, and I studied there for three and a half years," he recalled.

Once arriving here, he studied Hebrew and now speaks it fluently. His English, from his years of studies in the English-speaking medical school in Addis, is even better. Yitzhak applied to BGU to continue studying medicine and spent almost six years on his degree.

"What I learned at Blacklion Medical school in Addis was purely theoretical," he said. "We didn't have the medicines or equipment to apply what we learned. But I am able to do this on a high level here."

He met his wife, who immigrated in 1981, three years ago at BGU, and they live in Beersheba. To earn a living while studying, he worked in labs and with new immigrants.

For the last four years, he has worked part time as a counsellor for BGU medical students. "There is always some racism, but it comes from people who don't know you," he said when asked about the difficulties he faced. "At first, I felt hurt; I took it personally," he said. But gradually, he realized he would have to ignore it. Beduin students who were not in the medical school, which is "considered elitist," sometimes taunted him. "I was determined not to let it bother me."

He feared that some patients would refuse to let him touch them because of publicity about the relatively high rate of HIV infection among Ethiopian immigrants, "but I had enough self-confidence to overcome this."

Besides encouragement from his father, he received moral support from Prof. Shimon Glick, former dean of the BGU medical faculty (whom he calls his "spiritual father"), and Dr. Moshe Schein, with whom he worked at the "Little Hadassah" community health center in Jerusalem's Kiryat Hayovel quarter.

While pleased with his own advancement, Yitzhak is distressed about poor integration of many of the masses of Ethiopian immigrants. "There is goodwill among the authorities, but there are better ways to absorb them; there are major problems," he said. "I want to help my Ethiopian immigrant brethren, but I want to be a doctor to all."