Aynaw was born in Chahawit, a small village in northern Ethiopia, near the city of Gondar. Her father died when she was young and when she was just 12 years old she lost her mother to a painful illness. Heartbroken, she arrived in Israel with her brother to live with their Ethiopian Jewish grandparents.
At just 21 years old, Yityish Aynaw has gone on a remarkable life journey from a little girl playing barefoot in an Ethiopian village to an Israeli beauty queen who's ready to shine on the world stage.
Her win in February changed her life instantly. Within a matter of weeks, her name and image were splashed across newspapers and websites, both in Israel and abroad.
The publicity also caught the attention of one of her heroes: Aynaw was invited to an exclusive state dinner for Barack Obama in honor of his first visit to Israel as U.S. president.
"This was an incredible moment," she says. "He was a figure that I want to emulate. I did a project on him in school and I knew what he had been through and what he had done. He was like a mentor for me, so to meet him and say hello, it was like closing a circle."
Aynaw says she had never expected something like this would happen to her.
"Suddenly I thought about the little girl who had suffered and the little girl whose only dream was to run and play the whole day. The pain I went through; I saw it all," she says.
As the first ever black Miss Israel, Aynaw is seen by some as a beacon of hope that racial prejudice is beginning to fade away in the country. Aynaw says that she's never been the victim of racism but adds that there have been instances where friends of hers have been treated differently because of the color of their skin.
Who says dreams don't come true?
Culled from The CNN
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