Operation Magic Carpet (Yemen) - The Operation

The Operation

In the context of political upheavals, news of the foundation of the state of Israel, and the Aden pogrom, most of the Yemenite Jewish community decided to emigrate to Israel between June 1949 and September 1950. On a much smaller scale, a number of Yemenis made aliyah thereafter, until 1962, when a civil war in North Yemen put an abrupt halt to further emigration. Some wealthy Jewish families who doubted promises of a better future in Israel decided not to leave their properties, and a total of some 300 Jews remained in Yemen.

The operation's official name originated from two biblical passages:

• Book of Exodus 19:4 - Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare 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.

Operation Magic Carpet was the first in a series of operations whose purpose was to transport entire communities of Jews from Arab countries to Israel en masse during the 1950s and 1960s. In Israel's collective memory and legend the rescue operation is recalled as a successful rescue of Yemen's community from oppression towards redemption. 49,000 Jews were brought to Israel under the program. The infant mortality rate in Yemen was 80 percent, while the infant mortality rate in Israel is about 1 percent. The project built schools in record time to house all the children, and taught the refugees Israeli Hebrew to allow them access to mainstream Israeli society.

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, in her book, The Exodus of the Yemenite Jews − A Failed Operation and a Formative Myth, argues that these accounts are a myth, that the management of the operation was botched by failures. She finds the lion's share of the blame to lie on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Israel, which abandoned thousands of Jews in the deserts on the border between Yemen and North Aden. Mismanagement or corruption by the imam of Yemen, 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 very high. A street in Jerusalem, one in Herzliya, and another in Kerem HaTeimanim, Tel Aviv were named "Kanfei Nesharim" (Wings of Eagles) in honor of this operation.