Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Yemeni Rabbi Saved By Israel Carried 500-Year-Old Torah

JERUSALEM – Israel has brought in 19 Jews from war-ravaged Yemen in what immigration officials described as the last covert operation to move members of a dwindling Jewish community dating back two millennia.

Seventeen people arrived late on Sunday, including a man who doubled up as the rabbi and kosher butcher in the northern Yemeni town of Raydah, carrying a 500-year-old Torah scroll, said officials. Two others came in a few days earlier.

The sacred manuscript’s departure from Yemen marked the de facto end of a community that has lived alongside its Muslim neighbors for centuries, only to be driven out by a surge in fighting and political turmoil.

Yemeni Jews have complained of increasing harassment since the rebel Houthi movement – whose slogan is “Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam” – seized control of the capital Sanaa in 2014.

Israel, founded partly as a haven for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, has organized waves of Jewish immigration including the mass transfer of most of Yemen’s then 40,000-strong Jewish community in 1949.

Fresh fighting and political chaos has since driven many of the people who stayed behind out of their northern homelands.

“This is a moment of utmost significance for the State of Israel and Jewish immigration,” the head of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency for Israel, Natan Sharansky, said in a statement.

After decades of airlifts of Yemeni Jews, the latest arrivals “brought the mission to its conclusion,” he added.

The Agency statement said around 50 Jews had decided to stay, including at least 40 living in a compound near the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, under Yemeni government protection.

Some members of the deeply conservative Jewish community had voiced concern that life in Israel or elsewhere would be an affront to their traditional values.

Yemeni government aid to those driven from the north – an individual monthly stipend of $20 – stopped about six months ago and the group remaining behind faces eviction from the compound.

Other operations have transferred Jewish populations from Ethiopia and, more covertly, from Arab or Muslim states with which Israel has no formal relations.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.