After concerted efforts including two special delegates who
traveled from Israel to Iraq where they covered hundreds of
kilometers, the Jewish Agency succeeded in persuading six
elderly Jews, most of them geriatric patients, to make aliyah
on a specially chartered plane. The aliyah operation, which
included extensive media coverage, involved chilul
Shabbos.
Based on media accounts the immigrants are a 99-year-old
widow, her widowed 70-year-old daughter, a 75-year-old woman,
a 90-year-old single man, a 46-year-old orphan and an 82-year-
old widower. Most of them lived under difficult conditions,
some were hospitalized, one was being treated by Christians.
Still it was difficult to persuade them to move to Israel
because abandoning old habits at an advanced age is usually
difficult and because most of them do not have close
relatives living in Israel.
To transport them to Israel a special plane was leased from a
Jordanian company and U.S. Air Force planes escorted the
flight to Israel. The plane landed at Ben Gurion
International Airport just before Shabbos and the immigrants
were transported to the nearby Avia Hotel, except for the 99-
year-old, who was immediately checked into Assaf Harofeh
Hospital.
Although the operation, officially dubbed Ezer Mitzion but
which the media referred to as "Mivtza Savta," or "the
Granny Operation," was classified as a secret operation (from
whom the secret was being kept remains unclear), numerous
reporters descended upon the arrivals immediately, hoping for
a scoop.
They snapped away with their cameras and interviewed the
various relatives, who displayed great excitement. All this
took place on Friday night after Shabbos began. Absorption
Minister Tzippi Livni also rushed to the scene that same
night to see with her own two eyes the wondrous sight of
immigrants from Iraq.
"The Absorption Minister does not keep Shabbat," Ministry
Spokesman Arik Fodor said, in reply to our inquiry on the
matter.
Newspapers devoted several pages of the Sunday edition to
this gala aliyah, with poetic outpouring on "aliyah after
2,700 years" as if the immigrants themselves had lived in the
Diaspora for at least that long. This phrase was entirely
inaccurate of course, since most Iraqi Jews came to Israel in
the early 1950s.
The vast majority of the Iraqi Jewish community departed soon
after Israel's independence because they (like Jews in Syria,
Libya, Egypt and other Arab nations) were in effect
systematically expelled by the Iraqi government. Iraqi
legislation in 1948-51 first outlawed Zionist "behavior,"
then deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality, access to
education, and finally, of all their property. President
Truman helped organize a massive airlift in 1951 to bring the
desperate Iraqi Jewish community to Israel.
Claims of putting an end to the Iraq Diaspora were also
inaccurate since another 28 Jews or more remain in Iraq, some
of whom conceal their Jewish identity.
All this at a time when the government is closing geriatric
hospitals due to budget shortfalls and when it is not hard to
find other elderly Jews in Israel living under horrific
conditions.
All of this coverage would have been a real joke were it not
for warnings that media coverage could have detrimental
effects on the situation of Jews living in various Diaspora
countries and trying to move to Israel in secret.
