On This Day in Jewish History: 13 Tishrei - Operation Magic Carpet - 1950
On this day in 1950, Operation Magic Carpet came to an end, when the last two aircraft landed at Lydda with 177 passengers aboard. Its real name was Kanfei Nesharim, On the Wings of Eagles, from the verse in which Hashem tells Israel that He bore them out of Egypt on eagles' wings and brought them to Himself. Over twenty-one months roughly 49,000 Jews were flown out of Yemen and Aden to the new State of Israel, in some 430 flights covering more than a million miles. The first of them, in December 1948, carried fifty orphans.
That detail is not incidental. Under the Zaydi imams, a Jewish child left without a father could be seized and converted to Islam by law, and the decree was enforced into the twentieth century. The community had lived under that and much else for well over a millennium, and it had never stopped looking toward Zion. Yemenite Jews were among the very first Zionist immigrants, arriving in the Land of Israel from 1882 onward in defiance of an imperial ban on their leaving. After the United Nations partition vote in 1947, rioters in Aden killed more than eighty Jews. The following year the Jewish quarter of Dhamar was looted on a rumor. When the new Imam finally lifted the ban in 1949, the community did not wait. Families walked out of hundreds of villages across the Yemeni highlands, some for three weeks, carrying their sifrei Torah, until they reached the transit camp outside Aden.
The flights themselves ran 1,760 miles nonstop, skirting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Transjordan, and were fired on from the ground seven times. The seats were torn out and replaced with wooden benches. An aircraft that normally carried 56 passengers carried between 125 and 145, because the people were so thin. Roughly 700 died in the camps at Aden before they could be flown out, and a monument stands over them in the Jewish cemetery there. The absorption that followed in Israel was in many ways badly handled, and the grievances from those years have not fully healed. But an entire ancient community went home. As of 2022, the United Nations reported that one Jew remained in Yemen.
