Saving the Forgotten Jews

In 1978, a letter arrives in Israel.

It sparks a modern Exodus.

One of them somehow managed to send a letter to Israel

saying we are here in Sudan, we are stranded,

we need your help, help us.

The plea comes from an unlikely source.

Fleeing famine, civil war

and religious persecution in their homeland, a desperate

cry for help reveals a lost community of Jews in Ethiopia.

We walked for more than three weeks in order to get to Sudan.

The Ethiopian Jews claim to be one of the original 12 tribes of Israel,

lost for 2,000 years in Africa.

When the Israelis decided that the Ethiopians were indeed Jews,

one of the 12 lost tribes of Israel, they realise that they

are going to have to smuggle 20,000 people

out of East Africa, a region almost universally hostile to Israel.

It was an almost impossible task.

Israel assembles a team to work under cover, outwit dictators

and overcome a civil war to rescue the lost tribe.

I was on my way in a helicopter when the pilot told me that he

had a message from Jerusalem saying that he should do a U-turn

and go straight to Jerusalem, the Prime Minister wants to see you.

This is the story of how a British businessman, a Mossad spy and a

seasoned diplomat risked everything to save the forgotten Jews.

For 2,000 years, Jews had lived in Ethiopia.

The mid-70s, there was a revolution in Ethiopia

and civil war and the Jews,

many of them fled to Sudan.

Having escaped civil war in their homeland,

the Jews are stuck in appalling refugee camps.

In Sudan, their religion makes life even harder.

You couldn't say that you were a Jew otherwise they would get,

you know, afraid of you...

My sister - they burnt her clothes

that were hang on the rope.

News of their desperate plight reaches Israel.

One of them somehow managed to send a letter to Israel

saying we are here in Sudan, we are stranded,

we need your help, help us.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin decides to act.

Begin was himself a refugee.

He fled from the Nazis in Poland during the Second World War,

leaving his family unfortunately to

suffer their fate in the holocaust,

and since then he had become convinced that

Israel must do everything it can to help Jews when they were in trouble.

So when this letter turns up, he knows he must do everything

he can to save the Ethiopian Jews.

Begin turns to his secret service - the Mossad.

The Prime Minister - he called the chief of the Mossad,

and he told him we have this news about Jews in Sudan,

bring me the Jews of Ethiopia out of Sudan.

Now how do you take them out? Because Sudan is an Arab country,

enemy, member of the Arab League.

With official relations between Israel and Sudan blocked,

Mossad need a way to work covertly.

They approach a then little-known Manchester businessman.

He receives a phone call he never expected.

When I received a telephone call my secretary was

giving 15 minutes to them.

When I heard the story I cancelled my appointments and we discussed...

They wanted me to be involved because of my trade on cotton.

David is an unlikely saviour of the Ethiopian Jews.

At 13, he had left school to become a market trader

in his native Iran.

Five years later, in search of his fortune, he moved to

Manchester, setting up a series of successful textiles companies.

The Israelis approached David Alliance because he was a successful

international businessman with good contacts in the Sudan.

This enabled him to set up an office in Khartoum and it's from that

office that the Mossad agents were able to plan their rescue operation.

Mossad enter Sudan and begin to establish the mission.

For the covert plan to work, David has to keep all details secret.

I was told that if it's not kept under cover

and the news came out,

the Arab countries might pressurise Sudanese

to stop it, so we have to keep it quiet and that's what we did.

Using David's office to travel in and out of Sudan, Mossad discover

a perfect base close to the refugee camps to carry out the evacuation.

Gad Shimron is recruited to help run it.

I went down to Sudan as a member of the operating team of the new

holiday village Arous - 40 kilometres from Port Sudan.

Mossad even went so far as to create a fake holiday

village in the Sudan, complete with a booking office in Switzerland.

Now occasionally reality intruded, when real paying customers

turned up and the Mossad agents had to pretend to be holiday reps.

But this subterfuge worked

because it allowed the agents to move freely around the country

and work out how to get the refugees out of their camps.

It allowed you to go round the country

and to drive to Port Sudan and bring tourists and go out at night and day

whenever you want actually with your rubber boats because you were,

you know, you're bringing tourists to the unique diving spots of Sudan.

Gad and his team create a plan.

They will pick up Jewish refugees at confidential meeting points,

rendezvous with the Israeli navy offshore

and then escort the Jews to Israel.

We had what we call the committee members.

Committee members were young Jewish boys in the camps who were our

contact liaison people in case we said tomorrow,

20 hours, or 8pm, 200 people

at the quarry 10 kilometres south of the refugee camp.

And we would come with our trucks, pick them up,

drive through the police control and army control.

Usually we have done it smoothly by bribing our way through.

All this activity by Gad

and his team does not go unnoticed by the Sudanese authorities.

It was just a normal operation on one of the bays of the Red Sea

and as it happened there was a unit of the Sudanese army

looking for smugglers.

They saw us and they charged...

and with their Kalashnikovs firing.

The officer was a young officer,

he didn't understand what actually is going in front of his eyes.

The commander of Gad's team is a still-serving undercover agent

known by the alias, Danny.

I saw Danny, the doctor and two more guys standing with their hands up

surrounded by Sudanese soldiers with nervous

fingers on the triggers of the Kalashnikovs, shouting at them,

and I was sure this is the end of the operation.

And then I saw Danny, he started shouting at the officer.

"You're an idiot, what are you doing?

"Don't you see, I'm bringing tourists to this country,

"night diving and bringing money to this country and you charge

"and fire and shoot at us. You are crazy!"

You could see that the officer, you know, he didn't know how to react...

and Danny understood that he is on the right path.

In the 1980s, relations between Israel and Sudan were tense.

The Sudanese have strong ties with their Arab neighbours.

Rumours of Jewish refugees leaving for Israel alert the Sudanese

to a potential Mossad plot.

They shut the borders to Ethiopian Jews.

The rescue now hinges on whether the Israelis can find a way

to reopen the border.

What they needed was a trusted middleman with good business

contacts and enough political clout

to influence senior Sudanese officials.

There was only really one candidate.

At that point I was asked again to go in and help, which I did.

Again, David needs to keep his real motives

hidden for the Ministers to meet him.

Once more he uses his Sudan office

and arrives under the pretence of a trade mission.

It was in 1984 when I went to Sudan.

And the aim was to buy cotton and at the same time, through that,

to try and help to bring the Jews out.

The Ministers he meets are unwilling to open the border or allow

any Israeli activity until David comes across an official

who studied in his adopted city of Manchester.

He gave a cocktail party that night, and another gathering

the next day and I met some people who were able to help me to open

the door again for the Ethiopians to move, which was very satisfying.

David is introduced to several influential ministers.

They are persuaded by his requests and reopen the borders.

News spread in Ethiopia that the escape route to Israel is

open again. Increasing numbers begin to make the hazardous journey.

We felt that Ethiopia is not our place

and we should go to another place - to Jerusalem.

I grew up hearing stories about Jerusalem, and about our

ancient dream of getting to Jerusalem and live a Jewish life.

We left the village at night

because we were escaping from the authorities in Ethiopia.

It's about 800 kilometres.

We walked for more than three weeks in order to get to Sudan.

There are many dangers on the road.

There were robbers stopping us and asking for money, otherwise

they will kill us and we were in the middle of nowhere.

In Sudan, they are put in temporary camps rife with disease.

We realised that we were going to stay in that desert,

live in tents for many months, maybe years.

14,000 Jews leave their homes in Ethiopia, many do not

complete the journey and thousands succumb to epidemics in the camps.

Around 6,000 people die or disappear.

They say that there is no family that got into Sudan

and didn't lose one of her members.

To get the Jews out of Sudan, Gad and his Mossad team need a new

plan that bypasses the heavily armed Sudanese coast.

So why not to land Israeli air force C130 transport aeroplanes

in the desert and bring in the Jews and fly them directly to Israel?

Sounds crazy, we tried it, it worked once and twice.

At this stage, the Jews are being smuggled out in relatively

small numbers every couple of weeks on military C130 transport planes.

It was a tried and tested method that had been used a few

years earlier to rescue Israeli hostages from Entebbe in Uganda.

But when word spread around the world that a terrible natural

disaster had hit the region,

they realise they are going to have to speed things up.

They need bigger planes.

In a year, a million people die

from one of the of worst famines to blight Africa.

It was now a race against time to save

the Jews before they died of hunger.

And to do this, Israel asked the United States to intervene.

After secret talks with the President, Nimeiri, a deal was done.

He will turn a blind eye as long as the operation is kept secret,

not only from his Arab allies, but also from his own people.

It's this that allowed the Israelis to plan a mass airlift.

6,000 refugees are stranded in the camps

and need to be airlifted to safety.

Considered a modern exodus, this mission is named Operation Moses.

The US, Israel and Sudan put the final details together.

The operation takes place in a total blackout.

Sudan's allies cannot know it is assisting Israel.

A Belgian aviation company fly via Europe.

The Jews were taken from the refugee camps in military convoys, actually.

I mean, the Sudanese soldiers didn't know.

They thought those are refugees being evacuated to Europe.

They were taken to Khartoum international airport,

flown to Europe and from Europe straight to Israel,

sometimes, you know, the airplane would only touch and go

in Athens, you know, change call number and continue to Israel.

In a short period of seven weeks, over 6,000 Jewish refugees

were lifted, airlifted out of Sudan.

With a few days remaining before all the Jews in the camps can be

evacuated, the story breaks.

The news was spread on the radio, the international radio and media

and TV, and Nimeiri of course had to say,

"Oh, I didn't know, I stopped it."

And that was the end of Operation Moses.

With rescue from Sudan no longer possible, the Israeli

government focus on the remaining Jews trapped in Ethiopia.

From 1985 until 1990,

Israeli efforts to negotiate with the dictator of Ethiopia fail.

Ethiopia's dictator was Colonel Mengistu,

known as the butcher of Addis Ababa,

because he came to power in a military coup in 1977.

In fact, it was rumoured that he had personally suffocated

the former Emperor - Haile Selassie - with a pillow.

Now this was the time of the Cold War,

and for most of the 1980s, Mengistu was fighting a civil war with

military aid from the Soviet Union.

In return, he's agreed to expel not only all US diplomats,

but those of their allies, including Israel.

By 1990, the Soviet Union is no longer in a position to

give him military aid so he turns to Israel as a way of building

bridges with the United States.

He offered Israel the chance to resume relations.

The Israeli Prime Minister seizes the opportunity.

He turns to a trusted emissary and the former ambassador to Ethiopia.

I was on my way in a helicopter when the pilot told me that he

had a message from Jerusalem saying that he should do a U-turn

and go straight to Jerusalem as the Prime Minister wants to see you.

I was, as it were, whisked into the Prime Minster's office.

He said, "Look, I was reminded that you had been ambassador to Ethiopia

"and I need your help."

Mengistu sets his price.

He wants weapons but Uri is ordered to obey a US arms

embargo on the Ethiopian regime.

So the negotiations come down to money - the Jews become hostages.

My question was how much? He shot at me a figure.

180 million.

I was absolutely stunned, but I said, "You're joking."

After months of hopeless negotiation, the government of Israel turn

once more to David Alliance, by now an influential millionaire.

I was asked by Uri Lubrani to go to Ethiopia.

So I went there.

We were asked if you want the Jews, you have to give us arms,

and we could not give arms.

David was desperate to find a way around Mengistu's demands.

I offered to take the production of the textile for a whole year.

I offered to put up a new factory there.

I did everything. We tried, tried very hard without success.

Saw all the ministers.

Then we were invited to go to see the President.

By now, Mengistu is losing the civil war.

He has become desperate and paranoid.

I suddenly saw, the guns is aiming at us through the curtain.

The President, "Give me arms, you can have the Jews."

I said to him, "Mr President, you must accept that there aren't

"going to be any arms but we can make your life easier financially."

He didn't say no to it, we started talking and negotiating

and we got his agreement.

A personal payment to Mengistu is agreed

and he orders his government to set a lower price for the Jews.

Uri can now finalise this payment.

Talks progress until news arrives of a problem.

I get up one morning

and I'm told by this Ethiopian who was my contact, "I'm sorry,

"Mr Mengistu, he fled to Zimbabwe, taking all his group to Zimbabwe

"so we have nobody to negotiate."

That was for me a very unpleasant news.

When Mengistu fled, the country was in chaos.

Meanwhile, Uri Lubrani was still talking to what

remained of the government in the hope of striking a deal.

He finally made a take it or leave it offer.

I asked one of my team's assistants to compute how much it would

take to transport an Ethiopian Jew

from Addis Ababa to Rome,

and from Rome to Tel Aviv because that was the commercial route.

Then they came up with a figure.

Uri's closing offer is to pay the Ministers what it would cost

to transport each Ethiopian Jew to Israel.

This is as high as he can go.

And still the Ethiopian Ministers hesitated, but with

the rebels closing in and in need of money, they agreed to a price.

It was agreed for 35 millions. A date was set.

The conditions under which permission would be

given were set down.

The mission is given the green light. Uri has to act quickly.

The rebels are making their final approach on Addis Ababa.

Uri has five days before they take the capital.

On May 24th 1991, the first plane lands.

Fanta is one of those to make the trip - she was just eight years old.

-TRANSLATION:

-I grew up hearing about Jerusalem.

I was told if we got there

all hardships would vanish because it was such a holy place...

Not a day would go by without someone talking about Jerusalem.

I remember my grandmother crying,

she was praying all the time in the hope that we would go to Israel.

Suddenly I heard a megaphone announcing that everyone who

has the right papers should go to the embassy.

We rushed so quickly, I didn't even have time to put on my shoes.

I actually came to Israel barefoot.

I got to the embassy and there were thousands of people,

it was total anarchy - I will never forget it.

No words can describe the emotions we felt

and the atmosphere of that day.

It was amazing.

35 military and civilian aircraft are assembled.

They have just 25 hours to airlift over 14,000 people.

The operation works at a lightning speed,

aircraft barely have time to refuel before flying on.

28 planes are in the air at the same time.

400 buses escort the newly arrived refugees to specially built

centres in Israel.

Years of planning are coming together.

Halfway through the day, the Ethiopians derail the mass airlift.

I get news that the control tower of Addis Ababa is beginning to make

difficulties for our planes to land.

So I asked them to find out what was happening.

The Ethiopian government are nervous

and demand Uri pay before the operation can continue.

With the rebels fast approaching, time is running out, but no-one

knows the Ethiopian bank number - the Finance Minister had fled.

Uri and the remaining Jews are stuck. He needs a miracle.

I asked for the person who is going to replace this

Minister of Finance person.

It so happened that I knew him when I was ambassador.

I said, "Look, you know me.

"Do you believe me that I, ambassador of Israel,

"would want to cheat you out of a miserable 35 million dollars?

"Take this phone, phone your boss, the new Prime Minister,

"saying that you were satisfied that the money was

"ready in the account of Ethiopia."

He phoned, the road opened up and the last planes began to move out.

The plane was going round 24 hours, the seats were

taken out in some of the planes in order to take more people in.

The Israeli army conquered Addis Ababa International

for the whole weekend.

The aeroplane was so heavy, that actually it made lanes

in the tarmac of Addis Ababa Airport.

We quickly left Ethiopia,

left the airport and went out of Ethiopian airspace

because I was always afraid

that at the last moment they would come and say,

"Wait, you haven't paid up this or that or whatever."

The planes are loaded with refugees.

One is so full it has 1,088 people crammed on board.

It remains a world record in aviation.

The mission, dubbed Operation Solomon, is a success.

Uri achieves what was unthinkable just a few years earlier.

He rescues almost all of the Ethiopian Jews.

After the euphoria of the rescue,

in Israel, life isn't easy for the Ethiopian Jews.

Racism, an unfamiliar society

and an educational gap make it a struggle for them to adapt.

When you see me, you know that I came from Ethiopia,

and this is something to many people is not easy to accept.

I think the fact we came from such a different culture,

a different part of the world,

makes it not easy to learn the new way of life,

to be integrated in one of the modern societies in the world.

MUSIC PLAYS

Despite struggles integrating,

the Ethiopian community maintain pride in their traditions.

Central to them is their annual festival of Sigd.

It is a celebration that marks what they believe to be

God's revelation to Moses.

In Ethiopia, the community prayed to return to Jerusalem,

today they worship in the holy city itself.

-TRANSLATION:

-Sigd is a great festival,

we want to celebrate that we are now in Jerusalem.

It's amazing that I'm the first generation to celebrate Sigd

in Jerusalem.

For Maharata and her fellow refugees,

reaching their promised land was no easy task.

To do this amazing journey, to risk so much,

in order to make it possible so, it is a miracle.

The rescue of the Ethiopian Jews was one of the great humanitarian

acts of the 20th century and one

that probably could only have been pulled off by the Israelis.

After the Holocaust, most Israelis were determined never

to leave Jews to their fate again -

whatever the difficulties and however far they had to go.

It was an extraordinary act.

130,000 Ethiopian Jews now live in the Holy Land.

Only a handful remain behind.

David, Gad and Uri were instrumental in creating an extraordinary

modern exodus.

It doesn't happen to any ambassador.

It just happens and I am very proud that I was chosen to do that.

In risking their own lives, they have changed the lives of many.

I helped her family to come out and a year or so later,

she wrote me a letter saying,

"I learn English in order to be able to write to you

"and thank you for helping my family."

That gives you great satisfaction.

They rescued the forgotten Jews of Ethiopia against all the odds,

helping them to fulfil their ancient dream of returning to Jerusalem.

I feel very proud being part of this operation.

I think it is the peak of my career in the Mossad.

I have done many things, but nothing compares to this - nothing.