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2 Av 5763 - July 31, 2003 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Shabbos Desecration in Covering Arrival of Six Elderly Jews from Iraq
by S. Fried

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.

 

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