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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: The rarely told story of how a handful of Montreal Jews covertly rescued 300 Ethiopian refugees
Description: Thanks to the Netflix action film The Red Sea Diving Resort, many people have heard of Operation Moses, when Israel rescued 30 planeloads of Ethiopian refugees, bringing them to the Holy Land. That covert operation launched almost exactly 37 years ago.
But even earlier, another secret mission took place to save several hundred Ethiopian Jews, which brought them not to the shores of the Mediterranean, but the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
In the early 1980s, a group of Montrealers decided to do what the Israel government had still only been planning. The group of lawyers...