Israel secretly rescues 19 Jews from Yemen

JERUSALEM — They landed in Israel late at night — a man in a dark suit and traditional headdress, wheeling a suitcase; a mother, veiled, in a long black robe and holding a sleeping toddler; and a rabbi carrying a Torah scroll believed to be more than 500 years old.

Photographs taken at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv by a representative of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that deals with Jewish immigration, documented the arrival late Sunday of the last of the Yemeni Jews who wanted to go to Israel.

“From Operation Magic Carpet in 1949 until the present day, the Jewish Agency has helped bring Yemenite Jewry home to Israel,” Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who is the chairman of the agency, said in a statement, referring to the airlifts of 1949 and 1950 that brought nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel soon after the country was established.

Roughly 50 Jews chose to remain in Yemen, including about 40 who live in a closed compound in the country’s capital, Sanaa, that is adjacent to the U.S. Embassy and where they are protected by Yemeni authorities, according to the Jewish Agency.