Judie Oron is a Canadian/Israeli journalist and award-winning author. Born in Montreal, she lived and worked in Israel for nearly 4 decades and now lives in Halifax, NS. After completing her BA in Anthropology at McGill University and academic research in African Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she worked as a feature writer at The Jerusalem Post, including a 4-year stint as a weekly columnist. Her articles have appeared in Lifestyles Magazine, The Canadian Jewish News, Weekly Press Pakistan, The Jerusalem Report, Hawarya Canadian/Ethiopian Press, and the Australian editions of Christian Woman, Christian Daily.
Judie left the newspaper to recruit and direct an unofficial rescue unit that assisted Jews to find their way from Ethiopia to Israel. During that period, she returned to war-torn Ethiopia to search for a missing Ethiopian Jewish slave named Wuditu. She located the child, released her from captivity and took her into her family. Cry of the Giraffe tells the story of Wuditu’s 4 years in slavery.
“I paid cash and was handed a human being,” Judie explains, “that experience changed my life.” Since publication, Judie has been speaking out about child slavery, bride kidnapping and obstetric fistula in 2 languages and on 3 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 reports. “My current novel in progress is focussed on another form of child slavery that is also wide-spread in Ethiopia, bride kidnapping.”
