Operation Magic Carpet (Yemen)

Yemenite Jews en route to Israel from Aden, Yemen

Yemenite Jews on an aeroplane

Operation Magic Carpet is the widely known nickname for Operation On Wings of Eagles (Hebrew: כנפי נשרים Knafei Nesharim), which was conducted by Israel between June 1949 and September 1950 to take in approximately 49,000 Yemenite Jews as part of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world. With support from the United Kingdom and the United States, the majority of Jews in Yemen—as well as 500 Jews in Djibouti and Eritrea and some 2,000 Jews in Saudi Arabia—were brought to Israel. British and American transport planes made some 380 flights from Aden Colony to facilitate the airlift.

Background

Since 1881, there had been an influx of Yemenite Jews to Mandatory Palestine in intermittent waves of immigration. In 1924, the Yemeni king Imam Yahya officially forbade Jewish emigration, but the population was able to circumvent this restriction by going through the British-ruled Aden Colony. At the beginning of World War II, there were some 28,000 Yemenite Jews among the Yishuv. A group of around 5,000 Jews were stuck in Aden since 1945 and only allowed to immigrate in 1948.

In 1947, when the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was announced, there was an uproar among Yemen's Muslims, leading to anti-Jewish riots in Aden, which resulted in the killing of over 80 Jews and the widespread destruction of Jewish homes. Further looting of Jewish properties took place in 1948, following the circulation of rumours accusing the local Jewish community of killing two Yemeni girls. Similar instances of harassment and violence prompted Jews throughout Yemen to emigrate in larger and more frequent waves.

Operation

The Israeli operation's official name originated from two passages in the Hebrew Bible:

• Book of Exodus 19:4 – Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself.
• Book of Isaiah 40:31 – But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

"Magic Carpet" was the first of a series of Israeli operations to aid Jewish emigration from Muslim lands.

The operation continues to be widely celebrated among Israelis. Kanfei Nesharim Street in Jerusalem is named for it, as well as a street in Herzliya, one in Ramat Gan, and another in Kerem HaTeimanim, which is a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv that was established by Yemenite Jews in 1906.

In 1948, there were 55,000 Jews living in Yemen, and another 8,000 in Aden Colony.

Motives and preparation

Jewish Agency's emissary, Rabbi Yaakov Shraibom was sent in 1949 to Yemen and discovered that there were around 50,000 Jews living in Yemen, which was unknown at the time to Israel. He sent multiple letters to convey the community's strong religious and messianic desire to come to Israel. David Ben-Gurion was reluctant at first, but he came around eventually.

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein showed evidence how the community's sentiment for aliyah played a part in the exodus, the extent of which surprised even the Jewish state and the agency in charge of the operation, who were not prepared for the mass of Jews who were fleeing Yemen. Once he realized that, Shraibom tried to prevent the coming crisis and urged the community to stay in Yemen, but the sentiment of the community for Aliyah was stronger and they came nonetheless.

Meir-Glitzenstein also claims that collusion between Israel and the Imam of Yemen who "profited hugely from confiscatory taxes levied on the Jewish community" led to a botched operation in which the Jewish community suffered terribly. Reuven Ahroni and Tudor Parfitt argue that economic motivations also had a role in the massive emigration of Yemeni Jews, which began prior to 1948.

Tudor Parfitt described the reasons for the exodus as multi-faceted, some aspects due to Zionism and others more historically based:

economic straits as their traditional role was whittled away, famine, disease, growing political persecution, and increased public hostility, the state of anarchy after the murder of Yahya, often a desire to be reunited with family members, incitement and encouragement to leave from those who played on their religious sensibilities, promises that their passage would be paid to Israel and that their material difficulties would be cared for by the Jewish state, a sense that the Land of Israel was a veritable Eldorado, a sense of history being fulfilled, a fear of missing the boat, a sense that living wretchedly as dhimmis in an Islamic state was no longer God-ordained, a sense that as a people, they had been flayed by history long enough: All these played a role. ... Purely religious, messianic sentiment, too, had its part, but by and large, this has been over-emphasised.

Criticism

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein criticized the execution of the operation. She especially criticized the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Israel, which, according to her, abandoned thousands of Jews in the deserts on the border between North Yemen and Aden. Mismanagement or corruption by the British authorities and the Jewish Agency also played a role. Some 850 Yemenite Jews died en route to their departure points, and in the community which reached Israel, infant mortality rates were high, albeit lower than in Yemen. According to Ben-Gurion's diary, the Yemeni children in the Israeli ma'abarot or tent transit camps were dying like flies. Children were often separated from their parents for hygienic reasons, or taken away to hospitals for treatment, but often, parents only received notification, often by loudspeaker, they had died. According to some testimony, there was a suspicion that the state kidnapped healthy Yemeni children, for adoption, and then informed the parents they had died. As a result, some decades later, the Yemenite Children Affair exploded, in which it was rumoured that something of the order of 1,000 children had gone missing. In 2019, Yaacov Lozowick, the former Israel State Archivist, explained the cases of the missing Yemenite babies in an article in Tablet magazine. There was a very high death rate, and disturbed medical professionals, he said, autopsied some of the bodies to try to find out why. Traditionally, autopsies were forbidden under Jewish law, and so this was hidden from the parents. Lozowick wrote that the files contained no evidence of any kidnappings. However in February 2019 New York Times published article, in which some of the missing children were found by DNA test by their living relatives. They were given for adoption to Ashkenazi Jewish families.

Aftermath

In 1959, another 3,000 Jews from Aden fled to Israel, while many more left as refugees to the United States and the United Kingdom. The emigration of Yemeni Jews continued as a trickle but stopped in 1962 when a civil war broke out in North Yemen, which put an abrupt halt to further emigration. In 2013, a total sum of 250 Jews still lived in Yemen. The Jewish communities in Raydah were shocked by the killing of Moshe Ya'ish al-Nahari in 2008. His wife and nine children emigrated to Israel. Other members of the Jewish community received hate letters and threats by phone. Amnesty International wrote to the Yemeni government, urging the country to protect its Jewish citizens. The human rights organization stated that it is "deeply concerned for the safety of members of the Jewish community in northwestern Yemen following the killing of one member of the community and anonymous serious threats to others to leave Yemen or face death".

It was forbidden for native-born Yemeni Jews who had left the country to re-enter, rendering communication with these communities difficult. Muslims were therefore hired as shelihim (emissaries) to locate the remaining Jews, pay their debts, and transport them to Aden. Little came of this. In August 2020, of an estimated 100 or so remaining Yemen Jews, 42 have migrated to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the rest would also leave.

On November 10, 2020, the U.S. State Department called for the immediate and unconditional release of Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, who had been imprisoned for helping smuggle a Torah scroll out of Yemen. A press statement said Marhabi has been wrongfully detained by the Houthi militia for four years, despite a court ordering his release in September 2019.

On 28 March 2021, 13 Jews were forced by the Houthis to leave Yemen, leaving the last four elderly Jews in Yemen. At the time, it was reported that there were six Jews left in Yemen: one woman; her brother; three others, and Levi Salem Marhabi. In March 2022, the United Nations reported that only one Jew remained in Yemen.

See also

• Amka
• Operation Yakhin
• Yemenite Jews in Israel
• Jewish Agency for Israel
• Austerity in Israel
• Ma'abarot
• Yemenite Children Affair
• Ringworm affair

External links

• Photographs of Operation Magic Carpet from the JDC Archives