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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