The persecution of Jews has been a sport across the Middle East for thousands of years. Baghdad-born Shlomo Hillel, using a combination of guile and guts, sought, and largely succeeded in ending the game in Iraq.
Later he would be a member of the Israeli parliament, a diplomat, government minister and, ultimately, Speaker of the Knesset.
But it was his risky and remarkable efforts to liberate Iraq’s Jews for which he will be remembered.
Hillel was born to a Jewish family in Iraq in 1923. Following a massacre of local Assyrians when he was 11, his family travelled overland to the relative safety of the British mandate in Palestine and its rapidly growing Zionist movement. He studied agriculture and later public administration and economics and became involved in Zionist politics.
In the 1940s he travelled back to Baghdad and worked underground seeking to find ways of moving Jewish families to a land that by the end of the decade would become Israel. It was difficult and dangerous. The overland routes — through Syria and then Lebanon or Jordan, and sometimes even more circuitously backwards through Iran — were perilous, with duplicitous smugglers and the usual threats to groups of travelling Jews. Hillel decided the emigration needed to be more certain — and speeded up.
He hired two ex-American air force pilots and secured a Curtiss C-46 Commando transport plane. The C-46 had such a poor maintenance and accident record it was labelled the “flying coffin” by US airmen during World War II. The planes were prone to catch fire and explode in midair while others simply went missing.
Read the article by Alan Howe in The Australian.