The Garden of the Immigrants from Babylon

The story

The Garden of the Immigrants from Babylon is a public garden in Neighborhood Gimel of Beersheba, and its name is the name of an operation: Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, also called Operation Babylon or Operation Olei Bavel, in which the Jews of Iraq immigrated to Israel. Iraqi law at first forbade the departure of Jews, and many left nevertheless, mainly by way of Iran. The operation itself began in April 1950, after the government of Iraq permitted the departure, and was planned and carried out by the government of Israel, the Jewish Agency and the Joint, in flights of the Near East company from Iraq to Cyprus; among the organizers were Shlomo Hillel and Mordechai Ben-Porat. As the number of those seeking to leave grew, so the number of flights grew, up to an airlift on the Baghdad–Lod line. Most of the operation was in the years 1950 and 1951 and it continued also in 1952, and within it more than one hundred and twenty thousand Jews immigrated to Israel; in Iraq a few thousand remained. The property of the immigrants was frozen by the Iraqi government and was estimated at that time at more than thirty-five million dollars. The name given to this garden gives that departure a place in the city, and so does also the central synagogue for the immigrants from Babylon, about one kilometer and two hundred meters from here, which the city knows by the name the Pyramid synagogue.

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