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The woman behind the story By Tom Segev Tags: Israel, Yemen On November 8, 1949, The New York Herald Tribune revealed that tens of thousands of Jews had been moved dramatically from Yemen to the then British colony of Aden, and were flown to Israel from there. The operation bore the legendary name "Magic Carpet." The immigrants themselves prefer to describe the event with a biblical image: "On the wings of eagles." Israel's military censor only permitted publication of the operation's details once they were published abroad. The scoop belonged to U.S. reporter Ruth Gruber, who had been invited to join one of the flights from Yemen as the guest of the Joint Distribution Committee. A disagreement arose as to whether she had been invited to write "for publication," or only "for background" information. Nearly 60 years later, it is still important for her to stress that she did not break the story before having received explicit permission to do so. Gruber is one of the world's most veteran journalists, perhaps even the most veteran: She will turn 97 in two months. Lucid, opinionated, vivacious and blessed with a sense of humor, she gives the impression that she is telling her stories for the first time - about how she got to Aden and decided to proceed to Yemen; how they told her that she was crazy, apparently with good reason, when she insisted on risking her life and heading for the desert to meet the Jews who had left their villages. Gruber will never forget the Torah scrolls they carried with them or how hard the journey was. "We are thirsty," they told her, and she chastised herself for not having taken some water along. One gains the impression that she is still agonizing over this even today. And no, it's not true what they say about Yemenite Jews: that they lit cooking fires on the plane during the flight to Israel. Advertisement Gruber followed their integration into Israeli society and was appalled. The newly arrived immigrants were lodged in army tents. Speaking this week, she said: "Armies always think 'tents.'" When she saw immigrants sinking to their knees in the mud, she demanded to see then prime minister David Ben-Gurion. She scolded him because she said Jews have no right to keep people in tents, not after what they had suffered. B-G claimed that before her, no one had told him about the harsh conditions in the camps, and he asked her to write him a report. The Gruber report is preserved in the Israel State Archives. Ben-Gurion read it in her presence and immediately demanded that it be translated into Hebrew and distributed among the cabinet ministers. He also ordered every minister to visit an immigrant camp at least once. "Because of you I, too, had to go there," then foreign minister Moshe Sharett once complained to her. When she asked him what had happened as a result of his visit, Sharett claimed that the camp had been closed. She would like to believe that this is true. Ben-Gurion knew Gruber from the time she covered the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine, whose work led to the 1947 partition plan. Before that she worked for a while as a special assistant to the U.S. secretary of the interior, who had sent her on a secret mission to bring several hundred Jewish refugees from Europe into the United States. In the course of covering the investigative commissions set up after World War II, Gruber apparently had a hard time remaining uninvolved with her subject, an essential journalistic principle. To this day she talks about the work of those committees in the first person plural. One day, when she was sitting in on discussions of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) in Jerusalem, someone told her an illegal immigrant ship had arrived in Haifa. She told president Chaim Weizmann and Ben-Gurion that she was leaving, and rushed to Haifa. Her newspaper's editors justified her decision: After all, this was a big story. The name of the ship was the Exodus. Its departure from France, with some 4,500 Holocaust survivors on board, had been well publicized. The British played into the hands of the Zionist public relations effort and, in their stupidity, sent the refugees back to southern France. Gruber wanted to join them, but the British refused and purposely misled her: They told her that the passengers would be transferred to Cyprus. Gruber flew to the island, where she encountered the harsh living conditions of those Jewish immigrants to Palestine who were being held in local internment camps. Once she discovered that she had been deceived, she quickly caught a flight to France. The passengers of the Exodus arrived in France on three British ships, but most refused to debark. The French refused to remove them by force and the British had no alternative but to send the ships on to Hamburg, in the British-occupied zone of Germany. They agreed to take Gruber along on one of the ships and - as she put it this week - they have been regretting that decision for the past 60 years. Among other things, she took a historic photograph of a swastika the passengers had drawn on a Union Jack. This week, Gruber related that when she saw that flag, she knew that the refugees were not just fighting the British Empire - they were fighting the battle of the Jewish people against the entire world. Gruber's reports fed into Leon Uris' best-selling epic, which Otto Preminger turned into an influential film. This week, "Exodus" was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and Gruber participated in the discussion that followed, at the Menachem Begin Heritage Foundation. Bookmark to del.icio.us   The bigger apple Study shows Tel Aviv is more expensive to live in than New York. 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