by Ruth Gruber
Refugee children in Marseilles wait to board an “illegal ship” for Israel, 1949. Most of the children on the ships were orphans, unaware of the dangers that lay ahead. If they arrived safely, many would be placed in Youth Aliyah villages, where children lived together, studied together, and prepared themselves for the new life in Israel.
In 1949, a little bit of Brooklyn could be found in Tel Aviv.
Galilee, 1949. The Druse people were a small, unique religious group who lived in the northern part of Israel.
The Yemenite Jews Fly to Israel on “Wings of Eagles”
1949
In 1949, a year after Israel was born, refugees began to rush into the country on ships and planes. It was as if rivers of Jews were flowing to the sea that was Israel. They came from the DP camps in Germany and Austria. They came from the prison camps in Cyprus. They came from the Arab world. And an entire bloc of 50,000 came from Yemen—virtually the entire Jewish population of that Arab country.
For years, any Yemenite Jew caught trying to leave Yemen was sentenced to death. Then, in April 1949, the chief imam of Yemen made a startling announcement: all Yemenite Jews could leave if they paid a ransom for each human being, including newborn babies, if they abandoned all their belongings, and if they paid a tax on their treasured Torah scrolls—the Arabs knew that the holy scrolls were as precious to the Jews as their lives.
Often barefoot, the people fled down the mountains and crossed the scorching desert until they reached Aden, a British protectorate situated on the Gulf of Aden between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
From Israel, I flew to Aden to cover the Yemenite “magic carpet” operation. At the Aden airport, an American working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) greeted me warmly, stowed my bag, camera, and typewriter in his car, and drove to the Hashid camp, where, earlier, refugees waited to be flown to Israel. His warmth changed to disbelief when I told him, “I want to go to the land of the sultan of Lahej. I understand it's the last stop along their journey, where they pay ransoms.”
“You're mad to go,” he warned me. “Not one of us working here has gone there. It's barbaric country. Two years ago, they killed thirty Jews. It was an Arab pogrom. They might kill you.”
“I'll be careful,” I said as we reached the camp.
Dozens of people were milling around, the men in long white gowns and round white caps, the women in slim cotton pants beneath their cotton dresses. Many wore head scarves, others wore caps trimmed with a fringe. Among them were beautiful women with copper skin and delicately carved features.
With the help of an interpreter, Suleiman Mossa Tenami, a tall, fifty-year-old tailor from Lidan, told me his story: “My wife and our six-month-old baby,” he explained, “we walked from our home for fourteen days to Sana [the capital of Yemen]. We were with thirty others. We felt traveling with a group would help protect us against Arabs who might rob and kill us.”
He watched with interest while I scribbled his words, then he went on: “When we reached Sana, we waited another two weeks for more people. Then from Sana, we began another eight-day journey by foot through the mountains to Sayani. And from there, we crossed the Yemen border to Aden.”
I left Suleiman in the camp, ordered a taxi, and called on J.W.T. Allen, the British agent in charge of the West Aden Protectorate. He was a weird-looking diplomat with long dark hair, white shorts, knee-high white socks, and a monocle. He studied my credentials, then telephoned the sultan, who agreed to let me enter his kingdom. Allen wrote out a pass and helped me hire a car with a pleasant young Arab driver named Mohammed, who became my interpreter and guide.
In the car, Mohammed made me feel so secure in this volatile area that I opened the notebook on my lap to read my notes describing the biblical Jews of Yemen. Their lives as Jews were marked by poverty and oppression. Many could neither work nor own land. Yet they were the artisans and craftspeople of Yemen, who had clung to their faith for over two thousand years.
I remembered how three years earlier, while traveling through the Arab world, I had interviewed a Yemenite official. He was one of the Arabs testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. In British-accented English, he told me how sad he was that 90 to 99 percent of his people were illiterate. He did not tell me—or perhaps he did not know—that the Jews of Yemen could all read and write Hebrew. They had teachers and rabbis who taught them, hoping that some day they would reach the Holy Land.
I shut my notebook and looked out the window. We were driving past herds of goats eating whatever few blades of grass dared to grow in that arid soil. There were white buffaloes, who seemed to be searching for food; some sickly-looking palm trees swayed in the hot wind.
At each outpost, guards stopped the car, and Mohammed, holding my pass, went inside an office to get permission for me to continue. The moment he left the car, guards pointed their guns at me. Mohammed returned, showing the guards the stamp on my pass. In the car, driving off, he said, “We're going to get away from these guys as fast as we can. Don't worry.”
There were no thermometers, but the heat must have been something like 110 degrees Fahrenheit. My body felt ready to melt when we reached the modern stone-and-steel palace of the twenty-eight-year-old sultan of Lahej. Mohammed drove past the palace to a dark alley, where a group of Yemenite Jews were paying ransom to a barefoot Arab in a plaid loincloth, a white shirt, and a white turban, sitting above them in a high white chair. He had a sheaf of paper on which he wrote in huge Arabic numbers the amount of money that was being added to the sultan's coffers.
When he finished, he tied his money up in a sack and told us to follow him. He led us into a large open courtyard that looked like a Chicago slaughterhouse. More than a hundred people were standing close to the wall pressed against one another. There were no chairs, no tables, only the wall and the suffocating heat.
Many were trembling. They watched me with fear in their eyes until Mohammed explained that I was an American journalist. Immediately, they left the wall and surrounded me, shouting. “They're begging you,” Mohammed said. “They're begging, ‘Water! Water! Please, water!' ” Children pulled at my skirt as they too cried, “Water! Water!”
I berated myself. Why hadn't I thought of bringing water and even food?
“Please explain to the people,” I told Mohammed, “ ‘Tonight, you will have water and bread. Tonight, we will be sending the trucks to take you to the Jewish camp where you will be safe. Tonight, you will have the food you love—fresh dates and milk.' ”
After an hour or more in the courtyard, we returned to the camp. I spent the rest of the day meeting with the earlier arrivals and taking photos. After dark, we waited for the JDC trucks that were bringing the people from Lahej. For safety, the trucks traveled only at night. There had been a serious attack on the trucks a few weeks earlier. The people had arrived shaken. “The Arabs were looking for money,” the truck driver explained, “but nobody had money, not even me.”
At midnight, a small convoy of trucks arrived. The camp burst into activity. Those who had come earlier rushed to help the newcomers jump from the trucks. The sick carried the halt; the lame led the blind. We immediately handed them water and bread and dates and milk. Many were so undernourished they could hardly hold the food.
I spent a week in the camp among the people. There were rows of small single-room wooden buildings with one fairly sturdy building. It was the camp compound, where the staff lived and worked and where I was given a bedroom. In desert style, the days were blazing hot while the nights were freezing. Each day, a blinding sandstorm whipped through the camp. Each morning, I was awakened at three by a beautiful murmuring sound. I strode out, wondering where the music came from. It was men praying before the sunrise, keeping themselves pure and holy.
Since the seventh century A.D., these Jews had lived under Arab domination in mountain and desert ghettos in Yemen. Although in bondage, they lived by the Bible, generation after generation, with f
aith in the words of the Prophets.
One night, I was helping newcomers off a truck when a man came rushing toward me breathlessly. “The Arabs caught our group. They tried to strangle us.” He put his hands to his throat. “They searched us for our money.” His hands trembled. His head shook. “We had nothing. They tried to kill us.” He clapped his hands swiftly. “We ran and ran. All the way we ran.”
The people spent a week or more in the camp, where they were fed, and if they needed clothing, were given Western shirts, pants, dresses, and shoes sent from America, Britain, and Israel. They were so malnourished that the average adult weighed about seventy pounds and a child of twelve weighed less than a youngster of four. The sickest ones were taken to the hospital. After the week of rest, they were ready to fly to their new homeland.
The American Flying Tiger plane, on which I was scheduled to fly with them to Israel, landed, with a jovial pilot straight out of Texas, in a cowboy hat, khaki shorts, and knee-high socks. We helped the refugees board the plane.
In the aircraft, with the help of an interpreter, I asked one of the older men, “Have you ever seen a plane before?”
He shook his head.
“Are you frightened?”
“Why should I be frightened? It's all written in the Bible.” He quoted the beautiful prophecy of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
“For all these years,” said the old man, “we waited upon the Lord and He kept renewing our strength. Now we're mounting up with wings as eagles. Only the Bible didn't say they would be American eagles' wings.”
The Yemenite Jewish refugees came down from the mountains to the transit camp in Aden. Here they received food, shelter, and medical attention from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee until they were considered ready to fly to Israel. I stayed with them in the Aden camp for at least a week. I'd be awakened at dawn every day with the men praying and singing. They'd been doing this for two thousand years.
On the road to freedom with a stopover in the camp in Aden, Yemenite Jews often carried all their worldly goods on their heads. Once they were flown into Israel, they would be given Western clothes.
The convoys arrived at the transit camp in Aden at eleven o'clock at night. As soon as the Yemenite Jews got off the trucks, we brought them indoors and gave them milk and dates, and then showed them where they could sleep. I stayed with them. I realized they were biblical Jews.
Few people knew that there were so many black Jews in the world. The Yemenites were gorgeous. The women were beauties. Their favorite singer in Israel for years was a Yemenite, Shoshana Damari. Very often, we'd appear together. She'd sing, and I'd speak.
In the transit camp in Aden, the Joint Distribution Committee had a warehouse with clothes donated by American women. If the refugees wanted Western clothes, they were outfitted in the warehouse.
Choosing what to wear from the big warehouse of donated goods, refugees enjoyed mixing Western and traditional styles. The bride in a fringed Yemenite hood shyly displayed her Western silk blouse to the amusement of her husband. The clothes were donated by concerned Jewish communities from around the world.
The holy scrolls were precious to the Yemenites. Suleiman Mossa Tenami sang in rapture as he held the Torah.
Yemenite refugees depart from the Aden camp, run by the JDC, for a new life in Israel.
Most of this planeload of 140 Yemenite Jews had never seen a plane before. They didn't know what to do in a plane.
Because of years of starvation, they were so tiny that the plane could carry twice as many Yemenites as American passengers.
Yemenite Jews like this mother and child became citizens the minute they put their feet down on Israeli soil. From the airport they were taken to absorption centers.
Avram Gamliel with his son Shalom and his three daughters. His wife Sa'ida is off camera to his right. Avram had flown from Yemen to Israel a few months after his family; he'd contracted tuberculosis during the long trek and could not work. His wife and his seventeen-year-old son earned the family's food by picking oranges and grapes in season.
They were bewildered; here they were, plunged into a modern world. They had never seen a country like Israel.
When I traveled with the Anglo-American Committee, each reporter selected one of the Arabs to interview, and I selected the Yemenite Arab leader. I asked him, “How many of your people know how to read and write?” He said, “Well, we try to teach them, but 99 percent don't know how to read and write.”
But the Jews were all literate. Some of them only learned to read Hebrew upside down, because the adults and children would sit together in a circle to read the Bible, their only book.
Rosh Haayim was a new town made up of Yemenite immigrants to Israel, shown here in 1951.
Operation Ezra and Nehemiah: 120,000 Iraqi Jews Secretly Escape to Israel
1951
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning.
In 1951, I traveled through North Africa and the Middle East with my husband, Phil Michaels, on our honeymoon. We had met in 1948 in Puerto Rico during the inauguration of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín. Phil was a lawyer and social activist who had been invited to the inauguration in gratitude for helping the newcomers from Puerto Rico settle into life in New York. The governor, whom I met frequently while I worked in the Department of the Interior, had invited me as well. When Helen Reid heard I was attending the weeklong ceremony, she had said, “Cover it for us.”
The governor introduced Phil and me at a picnic on Luquillo Beach. He put our hands together and said, “You two New Yorkers should get to know each other.”
The Trib arranged for me to have a car and driver to cover the story. I invited Phil to join me. It was when we visited the slums of San Juan, where I saw his compassion and his determination to help others and make ours a better world, that I began to fall in love with him. We married in January 1951.
We were packing our bags for Israel when one of the leaders of the United Jewish Appeal came to see us.
“Ruth, we have a special request. A top-secret airlift is going to start shortly from Iraq to Israel. The Iraqi government is allowing nearly the entire Jewish population of 120,000 to depart. Both the Israeli government and American and European Jews need to raise the money. We'd like you to speak in private homes raising funds as soon as you return from your honeymoon. Will you do this?”
“I would love to,” I said, “but I have to live a story before I can write or speak about it. If Phil and I can watch the airlift, I'll do it.”
In Tel Aviv, our first interview was with David Ben-Gurion.
“BG,” I said, “I promised the UJA I would cover the Iraqi airlift and help raise funds for it secretly. I want Phil to join me. But I thought we'd better get permission from you, so that we'd have no problem at the airport.”
He nodded. “You have it.”
We chatted for a few minutes, said good-bye, and taxied to the airport. The airport director met us as we entered. I knew him from the hectic days in Haifa in 1946 and 1947 when he was in charge of the harbor where the so-called illegal ships carrying Holocaust survivors were docking.
The director led us to a cordoned-off area and wished us well. I hung my press card around my neck, put several rolls of film from my camera bag in the small pocket of my skirt, and gave the rest of the film to Phil, who stuffed it into the six or more pockets of his jacket and pants. I laughed. “One of the best fringe benefits of marrying you is that you have all those pockets!”
Knowing I would be running around shooting pictures, I told him, “You're on your own now. Let's plan on meeting back here in half an hour.”
I hurried to the landing strip and aimed my camera at a plane just as it landed. I was delighted. Three buxom women in red silk gowns and purple chiffon capes came down the gangway, looking as if they had come strai
ght out of The Arabian Nights.
After half an hour of excitedly taking pictures, I ran out of film. I returned to the spot where we had planned to meet, but Phil was nowhere in sight. I waited and waited, growing more and more impatient.
Finally, I decided to wait for him in the coffee shop. Soon, I was joined by the airport director. I was too embarrassed to mention that my husband had deserted me when an aide in uniform entered and whispered something his ear.
He stood right up. “Excuse me, Ruth. I must take care of an emergency.”
A few minutes later, Phil appeared. His hair was disheveled. His face was ashen. “Where were you?” I demanded. “You had most of my film! I got a lot of pictures, but I could've shot so many more!”
“They arrested me.”
“Arrested! Why would they arrest you?”
“Because I had no press pass.”
“Oh Phil,” I said. “I am so sorry. I completely forgot that you had no pass.”
Phil took a deep breath. “The police picked me up and demanded to know what I was doing in the cordoned-off area. I told them I was with you and that Ben-Gurion had given us permission to come here. They didn't believe a word and put me in detention.”
I felt even guiltier. “This is all my fault.”
Phil tried to ease my conscience. “We couldn't have gotten here so fast if we had waited to get me a pass. We might have missed the whole scene.”
He put his arms around me. I was forgiven.
Within the next few days, planes and buses secretly went back and forth to Iraq, carrying some 120,000 Jews whose entire belongings had been confiscated. I heard rumors that the Iraqi government had enriched its coffers by $200 million.