Operation Solomon was one of the most remarkable rescue efforts in modern history, in which more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel in little more than a day. Now, in this riveting volume, Stephen Spector offers the definitive account of this incredible story, based on over 200 interviews and exclusive access to confidential documents. Written with the pace and immediacy of a novel, here is the dramatic story of the rescue of the dark-skinned Jews of Ethiopia. Spector recounts how 20,000 Jews were willingly lured from their ancestral villages to Addis Ababa, expecting to be taken quickly from there to the Holy Land. Instead, they became pawns in a struggle between the Israeli government and Ethiopia's repressive dictator, who tried to coerce Israel to sell him weapons he needed in a losing war against rebel armies. In the resulting stalemate, the Jewish community was forced to live for nearly a year in squalid hovels, vulnerable to the dangers of the city, including crime and HIV. Worse yet, the imminent collapse of Addis Ababa, with the rebels closing in on the capital, raised the threat of bloody street fighting or even a genocidal attack on the Jews, a small minority in a nation that is primarily Christian and Moslem. Spector describes the tense negotiations among Israelis, Ethiopians, and Americans, which became increasingly urgent as time ran low and the danger mounted. And he highlights the secret deals and sudden setbacks that nearly aborted the mission at the eleventh hour, even as Israeli jets sat on the runway in Ethiopia, waiting to take the Jews to the land for which they had yearned for generations. Recounting the full story for the first time, Operation Solomon is a stirring account of a heroic rescue achieved in the face of daunting odds.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Not for the general reader:
This is the kind of book that promises to tell about something but wraps it up in so much extra stuff that the core issue fades in the background. The core issue is how 14,310 Ethiopian Jews got airlifted into Israel in about a day and a half in 1991; the extra stuff is geopolitics and babble. I didn't get to page 50 because -though I am interested in the subject- I was bored to death. I don't care what happened behind doors in Washington or Moscow. Just make a summary of it and give me the... more info
ETHIOPIANS HAVE NEVER BEEN JEWS!!!!:
What on earth is the point of inventing Jewish roots concerning these deceptive Ethiopians when everybody knows too well why they became Jews: only because it was the only possibility for them to immigrate to Israel only for economic reasons (to flee their undescribable poverty). Were these Ethiopians Jews in Ethiopia? NO! NEVER EVER!! They were Christians! A significant number of them in Israel returned to their Christian faith even though most of them decided to keep being Jew because they felt it... more info
Ethiopian history:
I have not read this yet, but have heard about it. We are glad to find any product that can help us understand our children's Ethiopian history and share with them as they get older.
A Fascinating and Well-Documented History:
It took the government of Israel nearly three decades to take significant steps to bring the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel, as Mitchell G. Bard of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise wrote, but when it did finally make a commitment to do so in the late 1970s, it carried out daring and dramatic operations. The story of Operation Solomon--how Israel evacuated more than 14,000 Jews in less than thirty-six hours--is the subject of Spector's fascinating and well-documented history. Following the first... more info
