BEN GURION AIRPORT, Israel, 26 December 2007 — A group of 40 Jews from Iran arrived here yesterday at the end of a secret operation marking the biggest recent influx of Iranian Jews from a country considered hostile to Israel.
The group of 10 families and three individuals flew into Israel via an unnamed third country in a covert and complex operation, said Yossi Shraga of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish immigration body.
The need for secrecy was dictated by Israel’s chilly relations with a country it considers its main enemy after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”
Family members waiting at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport gave the immigrants a warm welcome. Many broke down at the sight of relatives that in some cases they had not seen in 25 years. Excited and exhausted, the new immigrants were taken to an absorption center in the southern town of Be’er Sheva, where they will start their new lives.
Despite bitter enmity between the two countries, a record number of 200 Jews immigrated from Iran this year alone, according to the Jewish Agency. Yesterday’s group was the biggest to arrive since Iran’s 1979 Revolution.
