page_title: Yemenite Jews
section_title: Second wave of emigration: 1920 to 1950
hierarchical_section_title: Yemenite Jews / Immigration to Israel / Second wave of emigration: 1920 to 1950
caption_attribution_description: English: Immigrants from Yemen celebrating their first "Tu Bishvat" in Israel, at the "Rosh Ha'Ayin" immigrants camp. עברית: מחנה העולים בראש העין. בצילום, עולים מתימן חוגגים ט"ו בשבט ראשון במדינת ישראל.
context_page_description: Yemenite Jews or Yemeni Jews or Teimanim are those Jews who live, or once lived, in Yemen. The term may also refer to the descendants of the Yemenite Jewish community. Between June 1949 and September 1950, the overwhelming majority of Yemen's Jewish population was transported to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. After several waves of persecution throughout Yemen, the vast majority of Yemenite Jews now live in Israel, while smaller communities live in the United States and elsewhere. Only a handful remain in Yemen. The few remaining Jews experience intense, and at times violent, anti-Semitism on a daily basis.
  Yemenite Jews have a unique religious tradition that distinguishes them from Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardi Jews, and other Jewish groups. They have been described as "the most Jewish of all Jews" and as "the ones who have preserved the Hebrew language the best". Yemenite Jews are generally described as belonging to the "Mizrahi Jewish" ethnireligious group, though they differ from the other Mizrahi Jews who have undergone a process of total or partial assimilation to Sephardim and Sephardic liturgy.
context_section_description: During the British Mandate of Palestine, the total number of persons registered as immigrants from Yemen, between the years April 1939–December 1945, was put at 4,554. By 1947, there were an estimated 35,000 Yemenite Jews living in Mandate Palestine. The largest bulk of immigration to Israel, however, came after the declaration of the state. Israel initiated Operation Magic Carpet in June 1949 and airlifted most of Yemen's Jews to Israel by September 1950.
  In 1947, after the partition vote of the British Mandate of Palestine, Arab Muslim rioters, assisted by the local police force, engaged in a pogrom in Aden that killed 82 Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes. Aden's Jewish community was economically paralyzed, as most of the Jewish stores and businesses were destroyed. Early in 1948, the unfounded rumour of the ritual murder of two girls led to looting.
  This increasingly perilous situation led to the emigration of virtually the entire Yemenite Jewish community between June 1949 and September 1950 in Operation Magic Carpet. During this period, over 50,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.
  Operation Magic Carpet (Yemen) began in June 1949 and ended in September 1950. Part of the operation happened during the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War (May 15, 1948 – March 10, 1949). The operation was planned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. The plan was for the Jews from all over Yemen to make their way to the Aden area. Specifically, the Jews were to arrive in Hashed Camp and live there until they could be airlifted to Israel. Hashed was an old British military camp in the desert, about a mile away from the city of Sheikh Othman. The operation took longer than was originally planned. Over the course of the operation, hundreds of migrants died in Hashed Camp, as well as on the plane rides to Israel. By September 1950, almost 50,000 Jews had been successfully airlifted to the newly formed state of Israel.
  A smaller, continuous migration was allowed to continue into 1962, when a civil war put an abrupt halt to any further Jewish exodus.
  According to an official statement by Alaska Airlines:
  When Alaska Airlines sent them on "Operation Magic Carpet" 50 years ago, Warren and Marian Metzger didn't realize that they were embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. Warren Metzger, a DC-4 captain, and Marian Metzger, a flight attendant, were part of what turned out to be one of the greatest feats in Alaska Airlines’ 67-year history: airlifting thousands of Yemenite Jews to the newly created nation of Israel. The logistics of it all made the task daunting. Fuel was hard to come by. Flight and maintenance crews had to be positioned through the Middle East. And the desert sand wreaked havoc on engines.
  It took a whole lot of resourcefulness throughout the better part of 1949 to do it. But in the end, despite being shot at and even bombed upon, the mission was accomplished – and without a single loss of life. "One of the things that really got to me was when we were unloading a plane at Tel Aviv," said Marian, who assisted Israeli nurses on a number of flights. "A little old lady came up to me and took the hem of my jacket and kissed it. She was giving me a blessing for getting them home. We were the wings of eagles."
  
  For both Marian and Warren, the assignment came on the heels of flying the airline’s other great adventure of the late 1940s: the Berlin Airlift. "I had no idea what I was getting into, absolutely none," remembered Warren, who retired in 1979 as Alaska’s chief pilot and vice president of flight operations. "It was pretty much seat-of-the-pants flying in those days. Navigation was by dead reckoning and eyesight. Planes were getting shot at. The airport in Tel Aviv was getting bombed all the time. We had to put extra fuel tanks in the planes so we had the range to avoid landing in Arab territory."
  In the wake of the 1948 Arab Israeli War when vast territories were added to the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency under the good offices of Levi Eshkol, then head of the Settleme
caption: Yemenite Jews at a Tu Bishvat celebration, Ma'abarat Rosh HaAyin, 1950
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