Sigd belongs to a Jewish community that separated from the rest of the Jewish world before rabbinic Judaism reached it, and it has no equivalent anywhere else. Celebrated on the twenty-ninth of Cheshvan, fifty days after Yom Kippur, it renews the covenant: the community fasts, the kessim — the priests, called kahen from the Ge'ez — carry the Orit up a high place, read the covenant passages from Exodus and Nehemiah, and the people prostrate themselves; sigd means prostration, and it shares a root with mesgid, the house of prayer. Then everyone comes down and the fast is broken with a feast. In Ethiopia the mountain was a substitute for Jerusalem; in Israel it is held on the Armon HaNatziv promenade with the Old City in view, which the community itself describes as having turned a plea into a commemoration. The Knesset made it a national holiday in 2008. The generation born in Israel has been reshaping it, and the reshaping is contested inside the community: some kessim see the newer, more festival-like public version as a loss of the fast's seriousness, and younger Ethiopian Israelis have used the day to press on discrimination, on the status of the Falash Mura still waiting in Ethiopia, and on the memory of those who died on the route through Sudan.