Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands

After the State of Israel was declared in 1948, Jewish communities that had lived across the Middle East and North Africa for up to 2,500 years were uprooted. About 850,000 Jews left the Arab countries over the following three decades. In Iraq, after the Farhud of 1941 and new laws in 1950 and 1951, some 120,000 Jews left almost at once in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, giving up their citizenship and their property. Nearly all of Yemen's Jews, about 49,000, were flown out in Operation Magic Carpet. Riots, the expulsions from Egypt after 1956 and years of discrimination emptied ancient communities from Casablanca to Damascus. The Jews of Iran, some 80,000 strong, mostly left after the revolution of 1979.

About 650,000 of them came to Israel, many first to the tent and tin-hut transit camps, the ma'abarot, and then to new development towns; their descendants make up close to half of Israel's Jews. Homes, synagogues and cemeteries were left behind. Since 2014 Israel marks 30 November as the day to remember the departure and expulsion of the Jews from the Arab lands and Iran.