So Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was an amazing airlift created by the Mossad and Israel to get the Iraqi Jews out. I think it was one of the biggest airlifts in history. Jews from Iraq consider themselves Babylonian Jews all the way back from the Judean exile in 586 BCE with the destruction of the First Temple, and a lot of our customs, a lot of our food, can be traced back to the Talmud, which was developed in Babylon. My grandmother always said how beautiful life was in Baghdad, which is why I actually began with my question in my research, so why did they leave? If the Tigris River was such a wonderful place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews met at the coffee shops, only the men obviously... my grandmother described how she used to swap bread with her Muslim neighbor. They really had very real, very good relationships. A third of Baghdad was Jewish in 1917. They were integral to the society just like American Jews are integral to American society, Baghdadian Jews saw themselves as Iraqis. And the Jews were very much part of the Senate, they were part of commerce. They were part of every aspect of a modern country emerging in the Middle East. That's, that's where the Jews were, they were very proud of their position. So why did they have to leave? was always my question. It's complicated, because you kind of have to understand the history leading up to the airlift in 1950-51. Antisemitism was increasing in Iraq, there was the farhud in 1941, which was a massive pogrom against the Jews. They've got 180 names of people who were killed, officially, but over 600 more at least were killed and put into a mass grave. It was a massive riot. And they say that the only people who survived were people who were saved by their Muslim neighbors. Then with the creation of Israel in 1948, and the rise of antisemitism that had been happening before with pan-Arabism, which is just Arab nationalism, things became really bad for the Jews. And so Jews began escaping, smuggling themselves out. It was a very dangerous time, there was even a time where I think over 600 Jews were in prison. It was it was just a terrible, terrible, uncertain time to be a Jew, scary. In 1950 they created the taskit law, which was the law allowing Jews to leave. Before they weren't allowed to leave. There were no passports for Jews, you could not leave Iraq, you had to smuggle yourself out, as I said, it was very dangerous, because if you were caught, you were arrested and put in jail. And robbers could take advantage. So it was just perilous to escape and yet, still thousands were leaving. So this law was to contain the number of Jews leaving and also to make it official, also take away all their valuables. So Operation Ezra and Nehemiah was to get the Jews safely to Israel. One of the reasons the Iraqi government allowed it was they thought it would cripple Israel. Israel at the time was a fledgling state. It was in a deep depression. They didn't have resources for themselves, let alone 120,000 immigrants. Shlomo Hillel was an Iraqi who had moved to Israel earlier on, and he helped to orchestrate this mass aliyah. He tells the story of being called in to speak to Levi Eshkol, who was the Housing Minister at the time, and Levi Eshkol says to him, You cannot bring all the Iraqi Jews here, we don't have houses, we don't have food. We don't have jobs, you cannot bring them. And Shlomo Hillel was very upset by this. He left the office and he gets called by Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion says, I know you've been to Levi Eshkol, and he's right. We don't have houses, we don't have food, we don't have jobs. But you have to bring the Jews from Iraq, we do not want another shoah. We don't want another holocaust. And that gave Shlomo Hillel the go ahead to organize this major airlift. And it was complicated. When the Jews arrived in Israel, they only knew Hebrew from their prayers. They were suddenly seen as Arab Jews. They weren't seen as modern, educated, established Jewish community and they were treated quite badly. And the conditions were shocking in refugee camps. Jews coming from Europe at the time came broken, and the Iraqi Jews came whole, with their families. So they experienced their brokenness in Israel. And that was a trauma. But they also saw the European Jews and knew their story, they knew about the Holocaust, obviously, I think it's another reason the story isn't told as much, because it was shadowed by this tremendous pain of people who had lost their families in Europe.