ABSTRACT
The autochthonous Jewish community was greatly enlarged and eventually overshadowed at the end of the fifteenth century by the flood of Jewish refugees from persecution in Spain and Portugal. When the Syrian Jewish emigrants came to New York, they were welcomed by the 30,000 strong and well-established American Jewish community of Syrian origin, dating back to the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. In August 1992, Yemen, which for decades had severely restricted any foreign contacts with the roughly 1,000 scattered remnant of its once large Jewish population, announced that they were once again free to emigrate. The combination of physical danger and psychological terror prompted Jews to desperately seek ways of leaving the country. Some managed to circumvent the barriers to Jewish emigration by acquiring Christian or Muslim identity papers and passports. In an attempt to keep more middle class Jewish students within the community, a modern new $4 million school, with instruction in English, was opened in 1995.
