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October 22, 2010
Israel’s Operation Magic Carpet
Sixty years ago, the Jewish state undertook a massive airlift of thousands of Yemeni Jews.
BENJAMIN JOFFE-WALT THE MEDIA LINE
Sara Eden remembers her childhood in Yemen fondly. Born sometime between 1927 to 1928 to Yosef and Sa’ida Eden, she spent the first five years of her life in a valley beside Jabal Bani Hajaj, in southern Yemen.
“It was a happy childhood,” she recalled. “Economically, it was hard but there was a happiness to life there, even if you had nothing, you were happy.... My dad loved to sing and dance and I remember we would hold each other’s hands and spin around.”
After five years, the family moved north to a small village called Hesnayin, about 12 miles or, as Eden said, “five hours walk,” east of Sana’a, today the capital of Yemen.
“The mountain was very pretty,” she said. “We could see lots of villages and the wadi was full of water. By age five, I was already helping my mother and we would help my father to make bricks.
My father, Yosef, was a talented architect of sorts and also dug cisterns.
“One day, my dad went to the market and a very rich sheikh was asking around if anyone knew of a Jew who could build,” she continued. “The sheikh wanted to renovate a 100-year-old palace to preserve it, but no Arab was willing to go in because it was such an old building.
“My dad wasn’t scared and took the job,” she said. “It was beautiful and, in the end, the sheikh just let us live in the palace for six or seven years.
“When I was about nine or 10, my parents got the fever,” she continued. “One day, I was waiting for my mom to come home, as she was late for the Sabbath. Eventually, she came home and said, ‘I’m sick, I’m going to die.’ It was five months after my youngest brother was born, and the baby eventually died because my mother couldn’t breastfeed him. My mother died and it was very hard to deal with the entire house myself.”
When she turned 16, Eden married Yechieh, on the holiday of Purim. “I married my cousin and his sister married my older brother,” she said.
Contrary to the dominant narrative of Yemeni-Israeli Jews, Eden said the family’s relations with their Arab neighbors were warm. “We had good relations with the Arabs,” she said. “No problems at all. They never did anything wrong to us. On the contrary, they always battled to protect and defend the Jews.
“For example, when my grandmother was widowed with four young kids, she worried that they would ‘Islamize’ her kids. But, everywhere she went, she asked her neighbors to protect her kids, and they did.”
Eden said that, for most of her childhood, going to Palestine was a distant dream. “My mom had family in Palestine and they would send letters,” she said, showing a few of the letters she has saved in an extensive album of memorabilia. “A letter would come and 15 people would crowd around. We were not fleeing Yemen, and [emigrating to Palestine] was not about potential wealth. The pull to Palestine was about religious ideology. We heard about Israel only through prayers. We had no idea what was there.”
According to Eden, “people wanted to go to Palestine but they had no money,” so it was mostly the rich who left. “My mother used to travel to Sana’a and ask the rabbi, ‘When can we go to Israel?’ He would tell her, ‘This is the door and your day will come.’
“In 1942, my mom’s cousin arrived and told us all our relatives were at the airport and that my grandmother was taking all her kids to Palestine. We had to pay to get to Aden and my rich uncle who was going was supposed to pay. But he said he would only give over the money if my father agreed to marry me off to his 25-year-old cousin. There was a fight and, in the end, we didn’t go to Palestine. We never forgot what they did to us then. My grandmother and entire family left us alone in Yemen. There is tension that continues between us to this day.”
Five years later, the newly formed United Nations proposed a partition of Palestine between its Arab and Jewish residents and immigrants, which resulted in anger throughout the Arab world, and a number of attacks against Jews took place. Days after the UN plan was announced, Jews in Aden were accused of murdering two local girls and Yemen’s principal port city erupted in anti-Jewish violence. An estimated 82 Jews were killed, 106 of the 170 Jewish shops in the city were robbed, four synagogues were burnt to the ground and more than 200 Jewish homes were burned or looted.
“There was no radio or newspaper telling you about any problems or pogroms,” Eden recalled. “We didn’t even know about it so, for us, everything seemed quiet. But people who came to Sana’a would bring news so, a year later, we heard that there was a state of Israel.”
Following the Aden riots and the formation of the state, Israel quickly mobilized to facilitate the immediate emigration of Yemen’s entire Jewish community.
“One day, we heard that some Jews had gotten into Israel and everyone is leaving,” said Eden. “We went back to the village to sell our house [and] pack food for the journey, and had to wait for my sister-in-law to give birth. Then we walked five hours to Sana’a and waited there three months for a ride on a cargo truck to Aden.
“On the way to Aden, we would be stopped and they would check how much money everyone had,” she continued. “My sister had an eye patch and they even checked inside the eye patch for money! Each checkpoint would take 10 percent of whatever you had, and there were a few checkpoints along the way.
“When we got to Aden we were registered,” she explained, referring to those on the ground running the emigration operation. “They took a picture of each of us. It’s the first photo I have of myself.”
Operation on Wings of Eagles, more commonly known as Operation Magic Carpet, became the first mass emigration of Jews after the founding of the state. In a period of 15 months, some 49,000 Yemenite Jews were airlifted on 380 flights in American and British planes, from Aden to Israel. Many Yemeni Jews who came to Israel on Operation Magic Carpet speak of the moment they first saw an airplane.
“We looked at the plane and just said, ‘God help us,’” Eden recounted. “In the past, there were some people who said throw out your money and jewels because otherwise the plane won’t be able to fly, so some of them threw their money away as they got on the plane. When we flew over Israel and saw all these little tiny houses from high in the air, we said, ‘What’s this? The houses here are tiny! How will we live?’
“We arrived in Israel on the evening of Oct. 16, 1949,” she continued. “Before we left, people back home warned us that they were going to do to you what they did in Europe. When we got off the plane they told all the women to go to one place and all the men to another, and we thought, ‘Oh God, they were right, we’re going to die!’”
Eden was taken to an immigration camp in Ein Shemer and her husband was taken to Sha’ar Hagai to work on planting trees.
“In Yemen, the men went to school and studied Hebrew, but we didn’t understand one thing of what they were saying,” she recalled.
“I was five months pregnant when I got to Israel,” she added. “After my daughter, Mazal, was born, they required that the babies stay in the nursery and I would come to breastfeed her in the morning. One evening, they told me that my baby was sick and had been taken to the doctor,” Eden said. “Later, they told me that she died. They stole her right in front of my eyes. They stole lots of our babies, including mine and my sister-in-law’s. We knew something was wrong because it’s not possible they all died.
“A few months later, someone in the nursery said the babies had not died and they had been told not to say anything, but we still didn’t know who took them,” Eden continued. “The woman said ‘We don’t know who took them, we just know they were well dressed, took the healthy and pretty ones and sold them or took them outside the country.’”
In 2001, Eden testified before one of three national commissions of inquiry into the disappearance of Yemenite children during the early years of the state. The commission, which worked for almost seven years, determined that there was not “an all-inclusive establishment plot” to kidnap Yemenite immigrants’ babies and pass them on to other families, a finding which has been bitterly disputed.
Eden spent two years at the immigration camp and another two years at a transit camp in Binyamina before finally settling in what would become the Israeli city of Kfar Saba.
“We lived here in this house, one big house with the whole family together exactly like we did in Yemen,” she said, giving a tour of her two-storey home. “There were about 25 of us spread out over eight rooms, including the kitchen and living room.
“We lived like that for at least 20 years, all on the same budget, which helped us to acclimatize and make it here,” she continued. “All the food, culture, family and occupations – it just moved here.”
“My entire childhood, no one knew who was my brother and who was this person’s sister,” said Eden’s son, Rahamim. “It was just one big huge family and outsiders were very confused. All our life was a closed Yemenite community.
“As we went to school, it started to change but, back in the neighborhood, everyone was Yemenite,” he said. “Only after 10 years or so did we start to feel discrimination.”
Eden admitted, “It’s good in Israel economically but socially it has been hard, especially for the kids in school, because they wanted to separate the Ashkenazi kids from the Yemenite kids.
“It wasn’t so bad in Yemen,” she went on. “Every evening, we would all eat together, sing and dance. It was a wedding every night and our relations with Arabs were good. The Arabs cried when we left. I loved our neighbors and, if there had been telephones, I would have been in contact with them every day. I’d love to go back to visit. If I could, I’d be on the plane tomorrow.”
“If there were peace, we could go back to Yemen,” said her son, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Israeli army.
“First we need to enjoy the Holy Land,” his mother answered. “Then we can worry about peace and trips to Yemen.”
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