On the Wings of Eagles

"In 1949, The Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Yemen under­stood that they could no longer sur­vive sur­round­ed by ene­mies. They knew that the time had come to emi­grate to their ancient home­land of Israel. The peo­ple had always clung to the bib­li­cal promise that some­day they would return to Israel on the wings of eagles. Those wings turned out to be the gleam­ing sil­ver wings of a plane oper­at­ed by Alas­ka Air­lines and manned by an extra­or­di­nary pilot named War­ren and his crew.

War­ren saw the ter­ror on the faces of his pas­sen­gers and real­ized that none of them had ever seen an air­plane before. He wise­ly paint­ed the pic­ture of an eagle on the body of the air­craft to con­nect it to the dear­ly held prophe­cy, there­by reduc­ing his pas­sen­gers’ fears. But the fam­i­lies’ reac­tions were only part of the chal­lenge. War­ren and his crew faced threats and promis­es of ter­ror from Arab sol­diers deter­mined to stop the flight. He brave­ly per­sist­ed in his res­cue mis­sion earn­ing the thanks and appre­ci­a­tion of the fam­i­lies on board.

An author’s note tells the his­to­ry of this coura­geous mis­sion known as Oper­a­tion Eagles’ Wings or Oper­a­tion Mag­ic Car­pet. Alas­ka Air­lines oper­at­ed 430 flights bring­ing 49,000 Jew­ish refugees from Yemen to Israel dur­ing 1940 – 1950. This endeav­or was spon­sored and devel­oped by the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Joint Dis­tri­b­u­tion Com­mit­tee. Black-and-white pho­tographs of the oper­a­tion accom­pa­ny this fas­ci­nat­ing his­tor­i­cal note. A short bio­graph­i­cal note about the par­tic­i­pants of the sto­ry and a glos­sary of terms are also included.

This is a sus­pense­ful and well-told tale based on a true chap­ter in Jew­ish his­to­ry. It is accom­pa­nied by soft­ly col­ored, rich­ly detailed illus­tra­tions that help bring this mag­i­cal sto­ry alive for young read­ers today." —Jewish Book Council