Haftam Yizhak Heathwood used to be private about her Jewish migration story.

After she was born during the Ethiopian civil war, her family fled their home in Gondar on foot when she was a baby, and headed to Israel in the early 1990s, where she faced discrimination. As an adult, after she settled in New York City, she came to realize that her history had value.

“Now I’m the opposite — I want to share, because I want to show the connection that I have with other people that went through their own trauma,” she said on Wednesday from inside New York City Hall.

Heathwood was on hand inside City Hall’s rotunda for New York’s first-ever municipal celebration of the Ethiopian Jewish holiday of Sigd, the latest milestone for a celebration that until recently was little known outside of the Beta

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