Operation Ezra and Nehemiah

In March 1950 Iraq passed a law allowing Jews to leave if they gave up their citizenship, and in March 1951 it froze the property of those who registered. Between 1950 and early 1952 Israel airlifted about 120,000 Iraqi Jews, first via Cyprus and then directly from Baghdad, in flights run with the charter company Near East Air Transport. The hanging of the Jewish businessman Shafiq Ades in Basra in 1948 and a wave of bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–1951 had deepened the fear. Most left with little more than a suitcase.

The operation was named for Ezra and Nehemiah, who led Jews back from Babylonia to Jerusalem in the Persian period, closing a circle with a community founded after the Babylonian exile of −586, home of the Babylonian Talmud and the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita. In Israel many newcomers spent years in ma'abarot transit camps before rebuilding their lives; only a few thousand Jews stayed in Iraq, and today almost none remain.