Iran-backed rebels hold Yemeni Jew over Torah smuggled to Israel

Yemeni security officials say a member of the country’s Jewish minority has been detained over allegations he helped smuggle an 800-year-old scroll to Israel.

The officials said Yahia Youssef Yaish was being interrogated by the intelligence service run by Shiite Houthis rebels, who control the country’s capital, Sanaa, and are backed by Iran.

Yaish was one of a few dozen Jews who opted to stay in Sanaa after the Jewish Agency secretly whisked 19 Yemeni Jews out of the country to Israel last month, along with a Torah scroll.

The officials also said on Tuesday that three airport employees had been detained over the same allegations. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Yemeni intellectuals issued a statement demanding Yaish’s release and describing allegations against him as “fabricated.”

In Israel, Avi Mayer, the spokesman for the Jewish Agency, confirmed the Torah scroll was smuggled out of Yemen with a rabbi and a small group of Yemeni Jews who left to Israel last month.

“The notion that the Torah should have been left, without protection, in a country torn apart by a violent civil war involving several parties that are viciously hostile to Jews, is preposterous. The Torah is part of the proud heritage of Yemenite Jewry and that heritage will live on in the State of Israel,” Mayer said last month, after the London-based Jewish Chronicle reported an Orthodox Jewish man and Muslim airport employee had been arrested over the Torah smuggling.

The report did not name either person.

Moti Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman living in New York, who helped orchestrate the covert immigration operation, expressed concern the Jewish man was being tortured in custody.

“When I saw the scroll in the media I knew the Yemenite government would complain — they would say that international law was broken,” Kahana said according to the report.

The Jewish Agency last month brought a group of some of the last remaining Yemenite Jews to Israel in a covert operation, hailing the end of a decades-long “historic mission” to “rescue” the Jews of the country.

The 17 members of the dwindling community were flown in following a year-long secret operation involving the Jewish Agency for Israel and the US State Department. Two other members of the community were also brought to Israel weeks earlier.

The group constituted the final batch of approximately 200 Yemenite Jews brought to Israel by the Jewish Agency in recent years, the organization said.

Approximately 50 Jews now remain in Yemen, with 40 living in Sanaa in a compound adjacent to the American Embassy. Despite the ongoing civil war, they refuse to leave the country.

Some 49,000 Yemeni Jews were brought to the nascent State of Israel in Operation Magic Carpet in 1949-50.