The Last Jew in Yemen

In 1900, there were 100,000 Jews in Yemen, and in 1948, there were 50,000 Jews, almost all of whom were whisked out of the country between 1949 and 1951, to be taken to Israel in what has was called Operation Magic Carpet. Jews had been living in Yemen since 900 BCE. Now there is only one left: Levi Salem Musa Marhami. The Houthis have held him in prison since March 2018 for the crime of helping a Jewish family and an 800-year-old Torah leave Yemen. He has been tortured, subject to electric shock, beaten, denied medical care for his kidney and lung diseases, been subject to starvation, and prevented from communicating with his relatives outside Yemen. More on Yemen’s last Jew can be found here: “Who is Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, the Yemeni Jew held hostage by the Houthis?,” by Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Jerusalem Post, October 29, 2026:

Over the past three years, hundreds of Jewish hostages have been released from captivity across the Middle East, including Israeli hostages held in Gaza and Israeli-Russian researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released after more than two years in captivity in Iraq. Yet Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, a Jewish man held by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement, remains in captivity, despite a Houthi appeals court ordering his release in 2019.

Marhabi was arrested in March 2016 for helping a Jewish family and an 800-year-old Torah leave Yemen. In March 2018, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, but remains detained in Sanaa to this day, where Houthi terrorists continue to torture and mistreat him….

Asharq Al-Awsat reported in 2021 that the Houthis reached a deal to release Marhabi, exiling the three last Jewish families in Yemen in exchange for his release.

Those three Jewish families, the last in Yemen, apparently wanted to remain, but they agreed to leave in return for the release of Marhabi. What remains a puzzlement is why any Jew would want to remain in Yemen. Was it some kind of desire not to see Yemen emptied of all of its Jews? Did they want to stay out of a stubborn wish not to have Yemen entirely Judenrein, not to be the last to leave of a community that had been in Yemen for almost 3000 years?

And now that those three families have left Yemen, the Houthis have not met their part of the bargain. Levi Salem Musa Marhami is still in prison.

“They gave us a choice between staying in the midst of harassment and keeping Salem a prisoner or leaving and having him released,” one of the displaced Jews told Asharq Al-Awsat. “History will remember us as [some of] the last of Yemeni Jews who were still clinging to their homeland until the last moment… We had rejected many temptations time and time again, and refused to leave our homeland, but today we are forced.”

This person, a member of one of the three last Jewish families to leave Yemen, refers to it, touchingly, as his “homeland.”

As for Levi Salem Musa Marhami, he remains in prison, even though a Houthi court ordered his release in 2019. His lung and kidney problems remain untreated. He is still being intermittently starved and subject to torture, including electric shocks, for the primal crime of being Jewish. Where are the calls for him to be freed? Where are the protests outside the UN, demanding “freedom for Levi Salem Musa Marhabi”? Where are the speeches in Congress calling for his release? Where is that champion of human rights, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? And why do the Houthis treat this pitiful creature with such insensate cruelty?