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JERUSALEM
(AP) Six of the estimated 34 Jews remaining in Iraq have arrived in
Israel, including a 99-year-old woman, officials said. The
six were elderly and the effort to take them out of Iraq was considered a
humanitarian mission, said Giora Rom, director general of the Jewish
Agency, the organization responsible for bringing Jews to Israel. Iraq
once had a community of 130,000 Jews, but about 120,000 made their way to
Israel between 1949 and 1952, with smaller numbers of Jews leaving the
country in subsequent years. Only
34 Jews were found in Iraq by a Jewish Agency envoy who visited the
country after the U.S.-led defeat of Saddam Hussein's government, Rom
said. The
other 28 Iraqi Jews did not want to come to Israel, said Rom speaking on
Israel's Channel 2 TV. The agency supplied those who stayed with religious
articles. Among
the six that arrived over the weekend was a 99-year-old woman and her
70-year-old daughter, another 70 year-old woman who was the last Jew in
the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and a blind 90-year old Baghdad
resident. The
names of the six were not released, and the Jewish Agency kept the mission
a secret until they landed in Israel. Rom
said that one of the women spoke to her son in Israel for the first time
in 35 years during a stopover in Amman, Jordan. Two of the women were
taken by ambulance for medical checkups immediately after landing in Tel
Aviv. Channel
2 reported that the six had been flown from Iraq to Jordan with British
aid and from there to Israel on a specially chartered plane. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |