They landed in Israel late at night — a man in a
dark suit and traditional headdress, wheeling a suitcase; a mother, veiled, in
a long black robe and holding a sleeping toddler; and a rabbi carrying a Torah
scroll believed to be more than 500 years old.
They were among a final group of 19 Yemeni Jews
who were spirited out of their war-torn country in recent days, the Jewish
Agency announced on Monday, bringing a monthslong clandestine rescue operation
to a close.
Photographs taken at Ben-Gurion International
Airport near Tel Aviv by a representative of the Jewish Agency, a
quasi-governmental body that deals with Jewish immigration, documented the
arrival late Sunday of the last of the Yemeni Jews who wanted to go to Israel.
They are remnants of an ancient and once-vibrant
group that became increasingly imperiled by violence and anti-Semitism as Yemen
descended into civil war.
“From Operation Magic Carpet in 1949 until the
present day, the Jewish Agency has helped bring Yemenite Jewry home to Israel,”
Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who is the chairman of the agency,
said in a statement. He was referring to the airlifts of 1949 and 1950 that
brought nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel soon after the country was
established.
“This chapter in the history of one of the
world’s oldest Jewish communities is coming to an end,” Mr. Sharansky added,
“but Yemenite Jewry’s unique, 2,000-year-old contribution to the Jewish people
will continue in the state of Israel.”
Roughly 50 Jews chose to remain in Yemen,
including about 40 who live in a closed compound in the country’s capital,
Sana, where they are protected by the Yemeni authorities, according to the
Jewish Agency.
The latest immigrants included a group of 14
from the northern Yemeni town of Raida, including the local rabbi, and a family
of five from Sana.
Exactly how they reached Israel, which has no
diplomatic relations with Yemen, largely remains a mystery. Two countries that
long facilitated Jewish emigration from Yemen, the United States and Britain,
closed their embassies in Sana last year, as did many other Western countries.
Saudi Arabia, which has no formal diplomatic
relations with Israel, has imposed a naval and air blockade of Yemen. All
traffic to and from Yemen is supposed to be checked by the Saudis, including
flights, which stop in Saudi Arabia for inspection while traveling to or from
Sana.
It was not clear whether the Yemeni Jews had
left by air or sea for the first leg of their journey. Israeli officials
remained tight-lipped on the subject, possibly to protect the route in case the
Jews who remained behind decide at a later date to emigrate.
Arielle Di Porto, the director of Jewish
immigration from distressed countries at the Jewish Agency, who coordinated the
journey of the Yemeni Jews and met them upon their arrival in Israel, said only
that the recent immigrants had not arrived on an Israeli plane.
The new arrivals were taken to a so-called
absorption center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, and they have been
reunited with relatives.
The family from Sana that arrived late Sunday is
related to Aharon Zindani, who was killed in what was believed to be an
anti-Semitic attack in 2012, the agency said. It said that it had arranged for
Mr. Zindani’s wife and children to emigrate soon after his murder, and that it
had arranged for Mr. Zindani’s remains to be brought to Israel for burial.
Yehuda Sharf, the Jewish Agency’s director of
immigration and absorption, said that were no longer any Jews in Raida, where a
Jewish teacher, Moshe Yaish Nahari, was shot and killed by a Yemeni Air Force
pilot in 2008.
“All the Jews of Raida, Yemen, are with us,” Mr.
Sharf told Israel Radio on Monday, “even the last Torah scroll.”
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