The Exodus from Arab Lands: Magic Carpet, Ezra and Nehemiah

After 5708 Jewish life in Arab countries became untenable. Pogroms, arrests, confiscations and public executions followed; in Baghdad the Farhud of 5701 had already killed some 180 people. Over two decades roughly 850,000 Jews left the lands of Islam — nearly every community, some of them two and a half thousand years old.

The Yemenite community was flown out in Operation On Wings of Eagles, known as Magic Carpet: between June 5709 and September 5710 about 49,000 people walked across the desert to a camp near Aden and were carried out on some 380 flights. Many had never seen an aircraft. It is told that the elders boarded calmly because the Torah says, 'I bore you on eagles' wings' (Exodus 19:4), and they took it literally.

The Iraqi community — direct descendants of the Babylonian exile of 3338 and heirs of those who compiled the Talmud — was airlifted in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah in 5711–5712: some 120,000 people who gave up their citizenship and all their property. Twenty-five centuries of continuous life in Babylonia ended in eighteen months.

The newcomers were housed in ma'abarot, tent camps that were hard and humiliating. But the communities survived, and their melodies, customs and scholars became part of the new country.