Monday, November 02, 2009

The end of Yemenite Jewry



History will record that 2,500 years of Jewish life in Yemen is now over.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, the US State Department has completed a clandestine operation which brought 60 of the country's remaining Jews to America. The newspaper quoted Yeshiva University's Hayim Tawil, a Yemeni Jewry expert, as issuing the certificate of death: "This is the end of the Jewish Diaspora of Yemen. That's it."

The rescue illuminates an often overlooked aspect of the 60-year-plus Arab-Israel conflict. Whereas the Arab world has purposefully maintained the 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs made homeless in the course of the 1948 war and their descendants as permanent refugees and political pawns, the State of Israel and world Jewry have worked hard to resettle a roughly equal number of Jewish refugees forced to flee Arab lands.

In 1947, Arab rioters in Aden [Southern Yemen] killed dozens of Jews to protest a two-state solution in Palestine. In 1949 and 1950 the bulk of Yemen's Jews, some 49,000 souls, were airlifted here in "Operation Magic Carpet."
[Jerusalem Post]
*

2 comments:

LHwrites said...

Once again I learn something i did not know about from the Fine blog, Bruce's MidEast Soundbites!!!

Bruce said...

Thankx LH!