Scandal: More Yemenite Jews to be converted to anti-Zionism because of Jewish Agency incompetence

The Jewish Agency is furious that the American UJC plans to evacuate 110 Jews from Yemen, evidently to be hijacked into the arms of the anti-Zionist Satmar ultraorthodox fanatics. But the Jewish Agency has only itself to blame, for sitting on its hands and watching the persecution of Jews in Yemen. If the Yemenite Jews were refused visas to Yemen, the way was still open to arrange visas to a neutral country such as Austria or Italy, as was done with USSR Jews. But nobody really bothered it seems.

UJC to pull 110 Jews out of Yemen

Mar. 18, 2009
Haviv Rettig Gur , THE JERUSALEM POST

Fearing a spate of killings following threats to the Yemenite Jewish community, the umbrella body of North American Jewish federations will evacuate almost half of Yemen's Jewish community to the US over the next two weeks, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The United Jewish Communities is working with the US State Department, local federations and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to implement the evacuation and help finance the $800,000 expense of absorbing the 110 Yemenite Jews, who represent more than a third of the roughly 280-strong community.

"The funding would go toward such resettlement costs as housing, food and social-service programs," the the UJC said in a statement on Tuesday.

Jewish Agency officials blasted the move.

Jews "should not immigrate to the United States. The place of Jews is in their homeland, the Land of Israel, and like all the Jews of the world, the Jews of Yemen have to make aliya to Israel. That is their destiny," a senior agency official told the Post.

The agency is particularly upset because the extraction of the Yemenite Jews comes at the behest of New York's Satmar hassidic community, which opposes political Zionism and funds Jewish education institutions in Yemen.

Though the vast majority of Yemenite Jews now live in Israel, descendants of the large-scale aliya in the late 19th century and in the first years after the state's founding, the Satmars have campaigned for decades to prevent those remaining in Yemen from making the move.

In January, Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum, head of the Satmar hassidim in Kiryas Yoel in New York, called on US Jewry and the Obama administration to "save" the remaining Yemenite Jews, whom he said faced growing verbal and physical attacks,

Apparently in the wake of this request, the US Embassy in Sana'a has been interviewing Jewish families to grant them visas and refugee status in the United States.

Similar efforts by the Israeli government have been unsuccessful because Yemen has refused to approve passports for Jews wishing to leave for Israel...  .