Muslim extremists in the northern Yemenite town of Raydah continue to harass the small Jewish community after one of its members was gunned down last week, a local rabbi has said. Rabbi Yahia Yaish bin Yahia said he felt alienated in his own village after his brother Moshe Yaish Nahari, a Jewish teacher, was gunned down last Thursday by a suspected Muslim extremist. "Raydah is no longer like the old days," he told the 'Associated Press' outside his home in the village some 50 miles north of the capital Sana'a. "Raydah today is full of monsters," Rabbi Bin Yahia said. He is one of the roughly 400 remaining Jews still living in Yemen, mostly in Raydah. "If the State is unable to protect us and secure us in our homeland, the only alternative should be for the state to buy our houses and properties and grant us the money to leave the country," he told the 'Yemen Observer'.
Yemen was home to about 50,000 Jews in the early 1950s, but most of them emigrated to Israel. Yemen's Jews are thought to be descended from Roman-era Jewish merchants from Persia and Mesopotamia who traded in the south Arabian region. They have always been isolated from major Jewish centers, huddled in clusters scattered across the mountains of northern Yemen. Jews for the most part have long found Muslim Yemenis tolerant and lived in harmony with their neighbors.
Bin Yahia, however, said Yemen's authorities have ignored complaints from the Jewish villagers about death threats from their neighbors and described rising hostilities against the Jewish community in the village. He said people had thrown stones at his windows and Jews walking in the streets have been threatened. "Some have even raised their guns to our chests and necks, to our women's and children's necks," he said. A teacher at the village yeshiva, was gunned down on Thursday. A police official said a suspect with a criminal record had been detained.
In Israel, Jewish Agency chairman Zeev Bielski sent a letter to prime minister Ehud Olmert in which he expressed his concern over the recent attacks against Yemen's Jewish community. Bielski asked that Olmert work within the international community toward forcing the government in Sana'a to quash the growing anti-Semitism in the Arab country.
