Airlift of Ethiopia Jews Ends in Joy : Rescue: Operation flies more than 14,000 from embattled Addis Ababa to Israel in just over 33 hours. A plan to whisk them to safety was prepared six weeks ago.

More than 15 years ago, a group of Israeli and American men went to the small village of Quara in Ethiopia, spoke to the elders and asked for the names of all the Jews. Men, women and children--the men carefully wrote down their names and then drove away as suddenly as they had come, leaving behind a promise that, one day, they would be back to take them to Israel.

“They told us it is written in the Torah that the people of Israel will come in the end of days to Jerusalem,” said Alana Zouda Yitzhak, a village councilor in Quara.

On Saturday, Israel completed one of the fastest human airlifts in history, transporting more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv in just over 33 hours and completing a migration that spans 2,000 years of history and a decade and a half of negotiations between the two governments.

“Because I am Jewish, I have dreamed all of my life of coming here,” said Yitzhak, who sat, exhausted but jubilant, in a Jerusalem hotel room Saturday morning with his wife and nine children. “It wasn’t just yesterday that I started dreaming of this, and it wasn’t last year. All my life I’ve dreamed of this.”

In Addis Ababa, Asher Naim, the Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia, said the rescue operation consumed only about half the time originally expected. “We had a window out, and this was it,” Naim said after the final flight took off from Addis Ababa Airport.

The transfer of the mostly rural and destitute immigrants took place as an encirclement of the city by Ethiopian rebel troops posed the prospect of a breakdown of public order--and just four days after the flight into exile of former dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Mengistu had approved the emigration in principle as far back as November, 1989, but had burdened the procedure with red tape.

The operation rescued all of the Ethiopian Jews who had gathered over a period of 18 months in Addis Ababa seeking approval to emigrate to join family members who had left the country during and after earlier, secret Israeli and American airlifts in 1984 and 1985. Still remaining in Ethiopia are an estimated 2,000 Jews living in the remote province of Gondar, which has been under the control of the rebel Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front since February.

Ambassador Naim said that Mengistu’s departure into exile Tuesday was one of several elements in the quick transfer of the Jews, who are members of a mysterious community so ancient and isolated that their religious rites differ markedly from those of modern Judaism.

The new government installed after Mengistu’s departure wanted to project a more liberal political outlook, Naim said, as well as a willingness to respond to American interests that included the Jewish emigration. He said that plans for a major airlift had been in place for some time.

Israel state radio described the operation as “the largest human rescue operation Israel ever carried out.” It involved about 40 passenger, air force and charter flights between the Ethiopian capital and Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport.

The massive, $150-million airlift, dubbed Operation Solomon, at one point had 28 planes in the air at a single time. Israeli officials revealed that the talks leading up to the airlift involved repeated requests by the Ethiopian government for arms supplies, including a secret trip by Mengistu to Israel last June. Israel television said there were reports that the Ethiopian regime had received a last-minute payment of $35 million before the airlift was allowed to commence.

Officials refused to comment on what agreements were reached between the two governments, though they insisted that Israel had refused to supply any weapons to Ethiopia.

“I had to achieve something very negative from Mengistu’s point of view. I had to make it abundantly clear to Mengistu that we were not going to supply Ethiopia with arms, come hell or high water,” said Uri Lubrani, an aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir who negotiated the airlift operation in Addis Ababa. “They realized no arms were coming from Israel, let’s see what else we can get out of it. I felt it was then we began to talk business.”

Prime Minister Shamir said that President Bush was personally asked to intercede with the Ethiopian government to win permission for the airlift, “and he did not hesitate for a moment. He sent the letter and it did the thing,” Shamir said. “Thank God, we succeeded.”

The final details of the secret evacuation plan were drawn up six weeks ago as what Lubrani called a “doomsday scenario,” envisioning the potential need to immediately evacuate the estimated 15,000-plus Jews then remaining in Ethiopia, many gathered in temporary housing and camps around the capital at Addis Ababa over the past year in the hope of emigrating to Israel.

As the rebels closed in on the capital late Wednesday, Jews were gathered to the Israeli Embassy compound, many on the pretext of receiving immunizations. During the predawn hours of Friday, the first 14,000 were taken by bus to the airport, which rebels had agreed to refrain from shelling during the operation.

Aircraft from Israel’s national carrier, El Al, military transports, charter organizations and Ethiopian Airlines were mobilized for the airlift that concluded at 4:30 p.m. Saturday. The pilots included a former air force officer who served on the famous Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda, and the chief of operations for El Al, who piloted a teeming Boeing 747 stuffed with 1,087 passengers into Ben-Gurion Airport. Seven babies were born during the course of the airlift.

Greeted by Shamir and other top government officials, the immigrants, some stunned into blinking silence, some cheering, some trilling with joy, stepped down from the aircraft and were ushered onto waiting buses for transport to medical checkups and temporary housing. For many, it was their first trip on a plane, and they made their way haltingly down the aircraft steps.

“We didn’t think of this, it just happened, like a miracle, today,” said David Aellow, a 30-year-old elementary school teacher who arrived with his wife and two preschool children. “What will happen after this, I don’t know. I expect I will learn, I will make money, and I want for my children to learn, to be active, and to see the famous land of Israel. My family is here, and I want to be here. My time is up to live in Ethiopia.”

Operation Solomon, so named because Ethiopia’s Jews may have descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, involved hiring 700 new employees to staff 40 emergency absorption centers in hotels, guest houses and mobile homes throughout the country, concentrated in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Haifa and Beersheba.

If the experiences of their predecessors are any lesson, Israel may not be the promised land Yitzhak and Aellow imagined in their dreams. Already struggling to find jobs and housing for hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who have flooded in over the past several years, Israel will now be faced with the doubly difficult task of making a new home for thousands of poor immigrants who know little or no Hebrew, have few modern-world professional skills and little money, clothes or household goods.

At a time when Israel’s own economic problems are mounting, the transition promises to be a difficult one, many experts fear.

“Unfortunately, there’s no comparison between the Ethiopian olim (immigrants) that have come in already and the olim that are coming in now,” said Walter Harburger, an activist with an Ethiopian immigration committee that was instrumental in the first Ethiopian airlift from Sudan in 1984 and in the present one as well.

“The ones that came in before came in at a time of comparative prosperity and comparative low unemployment, and they did not have the competition of the olim from Russia for employment as well as for housing,” he said. “It will be quite difficult, and quite long.”

For the first time this year, the influx of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants will force Israel to spend more on immigrant absorption than on defense, propelling the country back toward a budget deficit and probably raising an unemployment rate that already is at 10%. A recent survey of Soviet immigrants showed that more than half of those who arrived between July and December of last year are not employed, and new immigrants are arriving at the rate of 700 to 800 a day.

Ethiopian immigrants, who arrive in many cases from small, remote agricultural villages with few job skills, have traditionally fared worse than the Soviets. A study last year showed that, more than five years after the exodus of an initial 16,500 Ethiopians to Israel, 35% still lived in dormitory-style government housing centers and unemployment among those over age 35 was about 45%. The suicide rate rose among young Ethiopians separated from parents and other family members still trapped in Ethiopia.

But Israeli officials, fearful that hopes for retrieving the remaining Jews from Ethiopia might be endangered with the collapse of the government there, have said that they elected to gather the community safely to Israel and work out the details of what to do with them later.

“Any day it could (have been) too late,” said Simcha Dinitz, chairman of Israel’s Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental authority which deals with immigration. “When you have an upset of a regime, everybody’s in danger, especially people in compounds are a target of looting and murder. When there is havoc and the central authority decays, there is danger for everyone who is given sustenance and food, where there is lack of food.”

Oudi Avraham, a 34-year-old grocery clerk, sat quietly in a darkened hotel room and described scenes of crowds running through the streets, pulling down pictures of Mengistu.

“This week, it has become very dangerous in Addis Ababa,” she said.

Avraham had been one of the thousands of Jews waiting in the capital for months for permission to emigrate and join her father in Israel. The latter had written that he found “the Garden of Eden” in the Jewish state.

Two days ago, she said, they were called to the embassy compound. “They told us to take no personal belongings, they told us to get on the bus, and the bus took us to the airport. They didn’t tell us till we arrived here where we were going. I didn’t think I was being taken to Israel. I thought because of what was happening there, maybe we were just being taken to a place of safety. Better to go anywhere rather than to die there.”

Her uncle, Andelo Yossef, stood quietly in the room as she spoke. Yossef, a farmer in Ethiopia, has been in Israel for eight months and is still studying Hebrew. He doesn’t know when he will be able to find a job. Yossef was one of the Ethiopian Jews evacuated in 1984, after walking for months to reach Sudan.

“I don’t know what my future will be here,” he said. “Maybe rather than making the effort to study here, it might be better to go back and work in agriculture. There’s no work here.”

In two adjoining rooms upstairs, Yitzhak and his family were jubilant. His 3-year-old, dressed in a long, red T-shirt suspended over spindly legs, leaped around the room shrieking, “Shalom!” His wife and oldest daughter sat crouching on the floor, hiding their smiles shyly behind a single shared green scarf.

“I don’t care what I do here,” Yitzhak said, admitting, as he casts a glance out the window, that he is not even quite sure where he is--except that it is Jerusalem.

“We can’t go downstairs, because we won’t find the room again,” he admitted with a grin. “But I don’t care what I will do here. I can say that I arrived here, and every hour I say, blessed be the name of God.”

Times staff writer Michael A. Hiltzik, in Addis Ababa, contributed to this story.

The Making of an Exodus

Operation Solomon was a logistic nightmare, involving formidable numbers of planes, dollars and human beings. A look at the statistics that made the exodus a success: * More than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted out of Addis Ababa.

* The cost of the rescue will top $150 million. Ethiopia reportedly received a last-minute payment of $35 million to allow the Jews to leave.

* A total of 40 planes, including Boeing 747 jumbo jets, Hercules cargo carriers and Boeing 707 passenger airliners, were involved in the operation.

* El Al Airline officials plucked the seats out of one Boeing 747 aircraft and fit 1,087 Ethiopian Jews in the cavernous cabin on mattresses.

* Crossing from Israel to Ethiopia along the Red Sea, the rescue planes covered a distance of 1,500 miles.

* The Israeli air force said 28 planes going back and forth to Addis Ababa were in the air at one time, a record.

* At least seven babies were born during the evacuation, two while en route.

* More than 700 people were hired on a temporary basis by the Jewish Agency to manage the operation.

* 263 buses were used to transport the immigrants from Ben-Gurion International Airport to 40 emergency absorption centers in hotels and guest houses across Israel.