Mick Hartley

November 3oth, yesterday, is the day Israel commemorates the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab countries and Iran. In Haaretz, the forgotten story of Aden in 1947, when riots against the local Jewish population broke out after the UN approved the partition plan for Palestine, paving the way for the founding of the State of Israel:

In Aden, which at the time was a British colony and today is part of Yemen, there was an ancient community of Jews numbering around 5,000 people, who lived alongside the local Arab population. The rioting began on December 2, 1947 and lasted three days. “On the night of December 2 the Arabs started to burn Jews’ cars in the streets,” Sasson recalled. “The next day they invaded our neighborhood. The streets were totally empty. We threw bottles at them.”

A day later Arabs started to torch Jewish stores, businesses, and homes. “A few families fled their homes and ran to our house, which was in the middle of the neighborhood. I opened the door and took in five families,” whose names he still remembers.

The Jewish leaders asked the British for help. In response, they sent a unit of Bedouin policemen under British command. “That’s when the disaster started,” Tuvia wrote. “The hooligans started to loot Jewish stores. The policemen stood aside and smiled. Another minute and you could see them assisting in the looting and pillaging.”

The British declared a curfew. “I didn’t know what a curfew was, so I went up on the roof to see what was happening in the street. I saw a soldier there with a rifle. I ducked and he shot at me.” The bullet didn’t hit him, but hit a 15-year-old girl who had found refuge in his house. “The bullet hit her in the head. She died on the spot,” he said. “There was great turmoil in the house.” They had to wait three days until they could put the body out for burial in a collective grave.

“Any Jew who called out for help or who went up to the roof to put out the fires in his house or to escape it was greeted with a hail of bullets,” wrote Tuvia, who had been born in Aden in 1920, immigrated to Palestine and returned in 1945 to organize aliyah to the soon-to-emerge state. “The mad cries in the Jewish neighborhood tore the heavens. All the Jewish homes were pockmarked with bullet holes. One house was burned. Dozens of bodies fell, one after the other.”

Gavriel David, who was an infant at the time, lost his grandfather, Yihye, in the riots. His recollections are based on the stories he heard from relatives. “Eighty-seven Jews were shot, slaughtered and burned to death. My grandfather was shot in the head by a sniper,” he said. “He didn’t die on the spot. He bled all night at home.” Yihye was evacuated to a hospital the next day, but died of his wound.

After three days, when the British army finally came into the Jewish quarter, the rioting stopped. “On Friday morning they went out to collect the dead,” Tuvia wrote. “A truck went from street to street to collect them. Every home brought down its dead to the middle of the street and Yemenite refugees buried them in a collective grave, with no funeral and no ceremony. The streets were filled with crying and wailing.”