The Ethiopian native was a soldier in Israel when a friend signed her up to compete; now she represents her country on the world stage
You can’t make a lot of assumptions about a Miss Israel — but I was pretty confident she’d like hummus.
I was wrong.
The aversion to Israel’s national chickpea spread is just a symbol of this beauty queen’s contrast to the many Miss Israels before her.
See, Yityish Aynaw, 22, is a native of Ethiopia and the first black woman ever crowned as Israel’s representative to the Miss Universe contest.
I wanted to make a good first impression. Damn you, hummus!
“In Israel, I don’t eat hummus,” she explained, shriveling up her beauty pageant nose after we met at Hummus Place in the East Village, which is popular with Israelis. “Now I come to New York and I’m supposed to eat hummus? It’s not tasty for me. I don’t like it.”
Oops.
Aynaw’s parents died when she was a child and she moved to Israel when she was 12 to live with her grandparents. Like all young Israelis, she was required to serve in the army — though she always used to joke with a friend that she should enter a beauty pageant after high school. Instead she did enter the army and attained the rank of lieutenant, in charge of a military checkpoint.
Yet soon after her military service ended, Aynaw got a call informing her that the friend had signed her up to audition for Miss Israel.
“I was an officer in the army and two months later I was a beauty queen,” Aynaw said, describing how she never smiled at soldiers during training lest she compromise her authority.
“Suddenly I was Miss Israel and I had to smile all the time,” she said. “Life surprises you. You never know what’s next.”
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SOURCE: JUSTIN ROCKET SILVERMAN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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