The Iran-backed Ansar Allah movement, better known as the Houthis, has issued an ultimatum to the Jewish community in Yemen. The Jews were given the choice to convert to Islam or face expulsion by the Houthi government.

An unnamed representative of the Jewish community in Yemen has contacted Israeli Regional Affairs Minister Ayoub Kara and requested help from Israel.

After the Houthi conquest of the capital Sanaa in Yemen in September 2014, supporters of the Shiite Islamist movement gathered in the streets and chanted anti-Jewish slogans. The Houthi logo features anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slogans as well.

Yemen’s Jews “want to leave there fast. We need to act fast to get them out, and we will do that, God willing. The whole world ought to know that there is a problem with the Houthis,” Karaa, who is Druze, told The Jerusalem Post.

An estimated two hundred Jews are still living in two communities in Yemen, one in Sanaa and the other in the town of Raida in the north of Yemen. Until the foundation of the State of Israel, the Jewish community in Yemen totaled 63,000 members; but between June 1949 and September 1950, roughly 49,000 Yemenite Jews were airlifted to Israel during Operation Magic Carpet. British and American cargo planes made some 380 flights from Aden during the secret operation.

The Jews left Yemen because of rampant anti-Semitism and violence by Muslims before and after the foundation of the State of Israel.

Anti-Semitism in Yemen at the hands of Muslims has a very long history and was documented in Iggeret Teman, the compilation of letters that Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimonides (commonly known as Rambam), one of the most respected Torah scholars in Jewish History, wrote in 1172 CE to Jacob ben Netan’el al-Fayyūmi, the head of Jewish community in Yemen at the time.

Here’s a fragment taken from one of these letters:

You write that the rebel leader in Yemen decreed compulsory apostasy for the Jews by forcing the Jewish inhabitants of all the places he had subdued to desert the Jewish religion just as the Berbers had compelled them to do in Maghreb. Verily, this news has broken our backs and has astounded and dumbfounded the whole of our community. And rightly so. For these are evil tidings, “and whosoever heareth of them, both his ears tingle (I Samuel 3:11).” Indeed our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and the powers of the body wasted because of the dire misfortunes which brought religious persecutions upon us from the two ends of the world…

Since the ouster of President Saleh in Yemen in 2011, anti-Semitic violence against Jews has been on the rise again, causing another 150 Jews to move to Israel. But anti-Jewish violence by Muslims terrorized the remaining Yemenite Jews before the upheaval in 2011. In 2008, a pilot of the air force in Yemen murdered Moshe Yaish Nahiri, a prominent Yemenite rabbi and father of eight as he stepped out of the front door of his home.

“Jew, here’s a message from Islam,” the pilot said; he then shot Nahiri with five bullets. The murder sparked another exodus of Yeminite Jews.

Although Karaa refused to elaborate on what the government in Jerusalem now plans to do, the expectation is that Israel will organize a new rescue operation that will bring the last Jews of Yemen finally home.

http://www.westernjournalism.com/gov...f-the-country/



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