Eli Eliezri

Eli Eliezri was born in 1935

Eli Eliezri was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and grew up in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood. His father, Rabbi Shmuel Eliezri, was a student of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, helped found the military rabbinate and later served as a rabbinical judge in Tel Aviv. Eliezri studied in religious schools, including a boarding yeshiva in Kfar Avraham near Petah Tikva, and became secular as an adult.

He joined the IDF in 1953 and moved from the military rabbinate to the paratroopers. He took part in reprisal raids and in the Mitla parachute drop of the Sinai campaign. He left the army in 1964 as a captain.

In 1964 he joined the Mossad. From 1969 to 1974 he served in Brussels, where part of his work was rescuing Jews from countries in distress. His last Mossad post was heading the department that aided Iranian Jews after the fall of the Shah.

In 1985 he joined the Joint Distribution Committee. In 1989 he went to Ethiopia as head of a Joint aid body and built a relief system in Addis Ababa for Jewish refugees. During Operation Solomon he managed the logistics of moving Jews to the airport and left on the last plane.

In 1992 he was sent to Yugoslavia, where he arranged air evacuations from Sarajevo that rescued more than 400 people. He ended his Ethiopia role in early 1996 over disagreements about the Falash Mura. He died in 2010.