6 | MARCH 11 • 2021 

PURELY COMMENTARY

guest column

The Man Who Flew 
120,000 Iraqi Jews 
to Safety in Israel
J

ews with roots in Iraq 
are today the third 
largest community in 
Israel — after the Soviet and 
the Moroccan. Did you ever 
wonder how they got there?
The mass 
aliyah of some 
120,000 Iraqi 
Jews between 
1950 and 1951 
is attributable 
largely to the 
efforts of one 
man — Shlomo 
Hillel, who died on Feb. 8 at 
age 97.
The Jews of Iraq, the old-
est diaspora in the world, 

had been through troubled 
times in the 1930s and ’40s. 
Hundreds were murdered in 
the Farhud massacre of 1941, 
and the Arab war against the 
fledgling State of Israel had 
led to persecution, extortion 
and the criminalization of 
Zionism.
In defiance of a travel 
ban, 12,000 Iraqi Jews were 
smuggled over the porous 
border into Iran. Working 
with a Jewish-born priest, 
Alexander Glasberg, to 
get the Jews French visas 
for Israel, Shlomo bribed 
Iranian policemen to look 
the other way. Posing as a 

member of the crew, Shlomo 
Hillel arranged the first test 
flights, piloted by American 
freelance pilots, to smuggle 
100 Jews from Iraq to Israel, 
Operation Michaelberg.
Before Israel had an offi-
cial army, Shlomo led the 
construction and operation 
of a secret bullet facto-
ry, under the noses of the 
British. The factory, known 
as the Ayalon Institute, 

was built beneath the laun-
dry room of a kibbutz in 
Rehovot.
When the Iraqi govern-
ment briefly lifted the ban 
on immigration in 1950 
on condition that the Jews 
relinquished their citizen-
ship, Baghdad-born Shlomo 
returned to Iraq as a Mossad 
agent to facilitate their airlift, 
dubbed Operation Ezra and 
Nehemiah.

Lyn Julius
Times of 
Israel

TIMES OF ISRAEL

Shlomo Hillel, 
architect of 
‘Operation 
Babylon’

continued on page 9

1942 - 2021

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