You Must See This Film in NYC on February 10.

February 10, 2008 - New York City - Sephardic Film Festival -

Bat Ye’or (author of Eurabia and The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh to Twentieth Century) and David Littman introduce the new documentary “Operation Mural”…

Operation Mural (US Premiere, 2007, 55 mins Israel, Hebrew, English, French w/English subtitles)
* Director: Yehuda Kaveh. Producer: Ronit Dor. Tribute to Israel at 60.

This film is presented in collaboration with the Dorot Division of the New York Public Library and the Institute for Sephardic Studies, CUNY Graduate Center.

Forty-five years after their clandestine mission, three Mossad agents return to Casablanca to retrace their steps in a humanitarian mission whereby 530 Jewish children reached Israel in 1961, under the guise of holidays in Switzerland. A special collective passport system was initiated, and then used with royal consent for the aliyah of 100,000 Jews in “Operation Yakhin” (1962-64). This film vividly documents how “Operation Mural” (16 March - 24 July 1961) succeeded beyond all expectations. The key actors relive their undercover activities: “Mural”, code-name of David Gerald Littman - himself unaware that the operation was directed by the Mossad - and his contacts, “Georges” and “Jacques”, assisted by a dedicated local group of Jewish youth (the Misgeret). There are many precious testimonies of children and key Mossad figures in Israel, and the Littmans in Switzerland - including a visit to the Home de la Forêt. This film documents a forgotten story, adding a new page to Israel’s heroic birth and history.

Post-screening discussion with the director, Bat Ye’or and David Littman. Moderator: Professor Jane Gerber, Institute for Sephardic Studies, CUNY Graduate Center.

Get tickets here.

Here’s the story behind the movie, fromYair Sheleg of Haaretz:

At the start of 1961, David Littman’s life seemed to be moving along nicely. He was 28 years old at the time, from a wealthy Jewish family, a graduate of prestigious Anglican schools. About a year earlier he had married G___, the daughter of a Jewish family that had immigrated to Britain from Egypt (today G_____, under the pseudonym “Bat Yeor,” is a well-known historian and writer focusing on Jews and Christians in Islamic countries). They already had their first child and had moved to Switzerland. Littman’s original plan was to continue the family’s real estate business, but he was not pressed for time, as he had already inherited considerable wealth from his father. And so he spent his time reading journalist William Shirer’s thick volume, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

The book, he says, left him unsettled. “I asked myself two questions: What should a Jew who lived in neutral countries like Switzerland or Sweden have done in those times, and what could I do today for the sake of the Jewish people?” He decided to knock on the doors of all the Jewish organizations in Geneva to ask them to give him something to do. But none of the groups had anything to offer him. And then, just as he was about to give up, he approached an organization called OSE (Oeuvre de secours aux enfants - the Organization for the Rescue of Children), which dealt with rescuing Jewish children during and after the Holocaust.

For the director of the organization, Prof. Jacques Bloch, Littman was heaven-sent. Only two days earlier, the emissary of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, Naftali Bar-Giora, had asked him for help in finding a volunteer for a secret mission to get Jewish children out of Morocco. Ever since 1956, when Morocco had won its independence from France, the authorities had prohibited Jews from leaving the country freely. Many Moroccan Jews suffered from harassment and the Mossad was organizing clandestine departures. But in January 1961, a disaster had occurred: The illegal immigrant ship Egoz, which had left Morocco in the dark of night, sank and all 44 passengers (about half of them children) perished.

A new route to Israel was needed, which was why the Mossad had come up with the following idea: One of the secret service’s emissaries would pretend to be the representative of a Swiss humanitarian organization and would make the following proposal to the Moroccan government to take hundreds of children (not necessarily Jewish) for a vacation in Switzerland. The Jewish children gathered by the volunteer, who would be posted in Casablanca, would indeed go to Switzerland first - but after a brief stay they would continue on to Israel.

To carry out this mission, a person was needed whose appearance and biography would befit that of the representative of a Swiss humanitarian organization. The tall, wealthy and supremely self-confident Littman seemed to fit this description like a glove. Thus Operation Mural (a name chosen at random) was born, in the course of which 530 Jewish children from Morocco immigrated to Israel. Last night, Channel 1 aired a documentary film about the affair, directed by veteran documentary film-maker Yehuda Kaveh (”Operation Mural - Casablanca 1961″).

Gad Shahar, a Mossad immigration emissary in Morocco during those years, relates that in order to maintain the mission’s secrecy and also to prevent Littman from revealing unnecessary information by mistake (or under interrogation), “Throughout the entire length of the operation, he [Littman] himself did not know that he was working for the Mossad. He thought he was working for the Jewish Agency and that the masses of children and parents who were knocking at the door of his office in Casablanca had come to him in response to advertisements that had been published in the Moroccan press. In fact, hardly a single Jew had seen those notices. They were important only for the cover. The parents and children came to him as a result of our secret work, going from door to door and to reach the members of the community….”

To finish this story….go here