Judie Oron

Judie Oron is a journalist and award-winning author who was born in Montreal, moved to Israel in 1967 and returned to Canada in 2004. Judie’s articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Lifestyles Magazine, The Canadian Jewish News, Weekly Press Pakistan, The Jerusalem Report, Christian Woman (Australian edition) and Baycrest Foundation Publications. Her award-winning novel, Cry of the Giraffe, is based on the true story of her daughter Wuditu's experience as a slave in Ethiopia and tells the story in Wuditu’s voice.

Judie studied Anthropology at McGill University and African Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She worked as a feature writer at The Jerusalem Post newspaper, including a four-year stint as a weekly columnist. From 1984 – 86, Judie acted as Director of the newspaper’s three charitable Funds. After the secret airlifts of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel (Operation Moses), Judie opened a fourth Fund, ‘Operation Homecoming,’ for the Ethiopian immigrants, who were arriving in the country with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Judie left the newspaper to organize and direct a group that assisted Ethiopian Jews to find their way from Ethiopia to Israel.

Judie took into her family and raised two Ethiopian Jewish sisters, one of whom she came across in Ethiopia in 1989. Upon learning that another sister was missing, she returned to war-ravaged Ethiopia three years later to find and release the girl from slavery.

After extensive research on the trafficking of children, bride kidnapping, child early marriage and other forms of captivity in Ethiopia, Judie has spoken widely in Canada, the US, Israel and Britain about these issues and has focused Wuditu’s story at the center of a campaign against abuses of girls in Ethiopia.