Aden pogrom
The pogrom in Aden from 1947 was a violent attack by Muslims against one of the largest Jewish Mizrahi -Gemeinschaften in the Middle East .
It began on December 3, 1947 with the arson attack on a Jewish building in Aden by an angry Muslim mob and then directed against the entire Jewish population of the city. The anti-Jewish motivated acts of violence culminated in a bloody pogrom and escalated into massacres in which a total of 82 Jews were killed and 76 others wounded. In the course of this there was also widespread devastation of the local Jewish community in Aden, which put an end to its millennia-old history.
background
Aden had been ceded to Great Britain in 1839. In the middle of the 20th century, the city of Aden in southern Yemen was still populated by a community of several thousand Jews. In the 1930s there were seldom religious outbreaks of violence, including relatively minor riots in 1932. In 1933 anti-Jewish attacks occurred in Aden, with many Jews being stoned and stabbed by Arab insurgents . These outbreaks of violence were of comparatively little significance. However, when terror broke out three days after the UN vote on the partition of Palestine , the lives of many Adenians were irreparably shaken.
Course of the pogrom
After November 29, 1947, the day of the UN vote on the division of the British Mandate for Palestine , there were widespread religious protests that took place throughout the Islamic - Arab world, including the foreign communities, with Aden being no exception. Shortly after they began, the protests in Aden suddenly turned into unrestrained bloody violence against Jews , fueled by false accusations against Jews that they had murdered two local girls.
The pogrom that broke out on December 2, 1947 was devastating - 82 Jews were murdered and 7 others wounded; 106 of the 170 existing Jewish shops in Aden were completely robbed and eight were partially emptied. Four synagogues such as the Magen Abraham Synagogue were "razed to the ground" and 220 Jewish houses were robbed and burned and / or damaged. The Selim girls 'school from 1929, which was located next to the Jewish King Georg V boys' school, also burned out during the riots of 1947.
With no British troops stationed in Aden at the time , the Jewish community was initially relieved when they heard that the Aden Protectorate Levies were being recruited to protect them. But the Levies - made up of Muslim Arabs - knowingly ignored the violence and instead shot the Jews unseen, killing many again in the process.
aftermath
Following the bloody unrest, there was a wave of expulsions against the Jewish community of Aden, with the result that it almost completely disappeared. In response to the increasingly life-threatening situation, most of Aden's Jews, along with the rest of the South Yemeni Jews, were secretly evacuated to Israel . This so-called Operation Magic Carpet took place between June 1949 and September 1950.
The final drying up of the Aden Jewish community took place in 1967, shortly after the Six Day War and after the Aden protectorate, as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, gained independence from the British. As a result of assassinations, looting and renewed destruction of other synagogues, the number of Jews in South Yemen steadily decreased. When it was discovered that the Muslim residents were planning a massacre against the remaining Jewish community, the remaining Jews were eventually evacuated with the help of the United Kingdom . The Jews of Aden was absolutely the "community that was once".
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Start of Operation Magic Carpet - November 8, 1949. Archived from the original on October 10, 2007 ; Retrieved November 13, 2009 : “One of the most dramatic mass immigrations of people was the Jews of Yemen through Operation“ Magic Carpet ”. For hundreds of years, this community within Yemen was no stranger to persecution and hate. In May 1949, the Imam of Yemen agreed to "release" 45,000 of the 46,000 members of the Yemenite Jewish community. From Hagshama.org.il "