A team from the NDC’s Rights and Freedoms Working Group paid a visit to the Yemeni Jewish community at Sana’a’s ‘Tourist City’ residential complex on Tuesday. 

The team members heard from Yahya Yousuf, who serves as grand rabbi for the community, about their situation and the problems which face them.

“We exercise our religious rituals normally and peacefully. We reject the construction of special schools for our children because we don’t like to be separate from other Yemeni people,” said Yousuf.

The rabbi said the Jewish children study at schools alongside other Yemeni children.

“Our children study Islamic subjects and the Arabic language, in addition to Hebrew,” he said.

Yousuf said however that members of his community are sometimes harassed by uneducated Yemenis, before adding that it is extremely important for people to coexist and respect others’ rights.

“We are Jews and, at the same time, we are Yemenis,” he said.

He said Yemeni Jews have the right to seek compensation for their properties in Sa’ada, Raidan and Amran, properties which they abandoned after receiving threats from Shi’ite Houthis.

“We left behind our properties - including an historic Jewish library, all we had inside it - and came to Sana’a following the Houthi threats,” he said, before adding that Houthis had also burned and vandalized Jewish individuals’ cars.

Yousuf said that Jews in Yemen were surprised after learning that a Presidential decree had removed the names of their community’s representatives from the list of NDC members.

“I felt saddened after we found out there would be no Jewish representatives to the dialogue conference,” he said. 

According to Yousuf, there are currently 300 Jews living in Yemen.