Nir Merry, a former Israeli Navy commando living in Mountain View, California, told J. in 2019 that he helped ferry Ethiopian Jews from Sudan's Red Sea coast to Israel in the early 1980s.
Ethiopian Jewish immigrants on their first day at an integration center in Ashkelon, Israel, 1984 (Doron Bacher / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0) [file photo]
Merry, born in 1959 on Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, served in Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy's elite commando unit, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He spoke to J. The Jewish News of Northern California as Netflix released The Red Sea Diving Resort, a thriller based on the same covert operation.
Israel's government assigned Shayetet 13 and the Mossad to bring out Beta Israel refugees who had fled Ethiopia into Sudan as violence against their communities grew. J. described the naval missions as part of Operation Moses, the wider effort that brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel through Sudan.
Merry said the bay where his team met the refugees was ringed by dangerous coral reefs. Dressed as tourists, the commandos scouted the reefs by day and hammered radar reflectors into the coral so they could steer rubber boats to the shore after dark.
Many of the refugees had walked for days or weeks to reach the meeting point and were already in poor health, he said. The team wrapped them in wool blankets for the rough, cold crossing, avoided armed Sudanese coastal patrols and carried them to a disguised Israeli Navy ship offshore.
“I remember picking [up] an [Ethiopian] lady and you could hear little squeaks. And I realized it was a baby tucked in her dress close to her body,” Merry told J. He said no one in the unit claimed the rescues as a personal accomplishment.
After his service Merry studied mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, and since 1995 he has worked at Applied Materials, the Santa Clara-based maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, J. reported.
Sources: J. The Jewish News of Northern California, J. (Wayback Machine archive)