Safe Travels?

Yemen definitely isn’t the place for the casual traveler, and the country’s history is long, vibrant and incredibly complicated. Multiple civil wars and tribal and religious conflicts have shaped the Yemen of today, and in many ways, the country is in a state of an extended humanitarian crisis, where hunger, sickness, and fighting have been ongoing realities for years. Yemen’s latest civil war has had Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fighting a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.  According to the BBC, more than 23 million Yemenis are in need of some form of aid, and some 150,000 have been killed in the current conflict.

Henfield was well aware that the State Department discourages Americans from going to Yemen, which it classifies as a Level 4, high risk country because of terrorism, civil unrest, crime, health issues, kidnappings, armed conflicts, and landmines. For weeks before his trip, Henfield monitored an online map showing real-time terrorist activity in Yemen, where both the Houthis and Al Qaeda are very active.

“This wasn’t my first Level 4 country,” remarks Henfield, who has also traveled to Iraq, Iran, and Syria. “That being said, I felt comfortable going after vetting my guide and speaking to folks who have also traveled to Yemen. I also read different travel blogs of people who have traveled there.”

It wasn’t lost on Henfield that the State Department treats every country as a whole entity, while security issues can vary from region to region and, as per his guide’s advice, he researched each area in order to make an informed decision on its actual safety. As in other Middle Eastern countries, there were definitely places in Yemen that Henfield deemed too dangerous to visit.

The fact that he was traveling shortly after October 7 had Henfield feeling more nervous than usual as he set out on his multi-legged trip.  Chatting in Cairo International Airport with the only other westerner traveling on his Yemenia flight underscored the potential hazards of traveling to Yemen.  The man was from South Africa and was part of a United Nations special team of explosive experts known as de-miners.

“There is a region north of Aden that is controlled by the Houthis that borders an area to the south and east controlled by the western-back government,” says Henfield. “There are tens of thousands of mines laid there and their job was to remove those mines.”

Henfield is always careful to dress unobtrusively when he travels in the Middle East, outside of Israel. No matter the weather, he avoids wearing shorts, and he keeps his attire simple, avoiding brand name shoes and shirts with logos.

“I keep everything very low key, with nothing that gets any attention, so that I don’t stick out like a sore thumb,” says Henfield.

Even before he set foot in Yemen, Henfield could easily see Yemen’s conservative vibe, with all the female passengers on his flight attired in black burqas, their eyes the only visible parts of their bodies. Yemenia boards its passengers by gender, with women boarding one shuttle that crossed the tarmac to the aircraft, while men were transported on a second shuttle. Despite the separation of men and women during the boarding process, seating on the flight was completely mixed, and no one seemed to care if they were seated next to someone dressed in a burqa or jeans.

Aden Is No Garden

A certain amount of apprehension is par for the course when traveling to a Level 4 country, and Henfield had some nail-biting moments when he first landed at Yemen’s Aden International Airport. As everyone else on his flight cleared through security, Henfield realized that he only had a copy of the visa he needed to enter the country. Magdi, the guide he had hired for the trip, had the original. Unfortunately for Henfield, Magdi was nowhere to be found and he wasn’t answering his phone.

“I was freaking out,” admits Henfield.  “I was just sitting there and the guys at the gate were like, ‘What’s going on?’”

Magdi showed up a full half hour behind schedule and presented Henfield’s documentation to the immigration officer. As the two sat in the immigration office waiting for the necessary approvals to come through, Henfield noticed something odd about Aden International.

“There was minimal seating, and people sat on the floor,” recalls Henfield.  “The security workers in the terminal were seated on a mat on the floor.”

The first thing that hit Henfield as he left the airport was Aden’s scorching heat. The second was the fact that there were no late model cars. The third, as he drove around Aden in Magdi’s car, was the condition of the city.

“All over the city, I saw bombed out buildings with bullet holes,” says Henfield. “It was like driving through a war zone.”

Much of the destruction occurred when the Houthis invaded Aden in 2015 and took control of the city. Eventually, the residents formed a militia that launched a counterattack and ousted the Houthis from their city, but even today, it still looks ravaged. The armed soldier that the Western-backed government had provided Henfield did provide a welcome sense of security.

“He didn’t speak a word of English, but sat in the back seat. He had a machine gun,” said Henfield.

Aden was small and congested, with tight urban areas and three- to four-story homes constructed of mud brick with British colonial architecture. Many of the people Henfield saw in Aden had their cheeks stuffed with khat, an addictive plant known to be a stimulant. While khat is used both medically and recreationally, it is linked to psychosis, depression, mood swings, and violent behavior, side effects that seem to matter little in Yemen, where more than three quarters of the population chews the plant’s green leaves. Also very noticeable in Aden were the ubiquitous mounds of garbage, a casualty of the city’s non-existent waste pickups.

Henfield’s first stop of the day was at Aden’s  11th-century Jewish cemetery, the only remnant of a once-thriving Jewish community that dates back to the time of the Mishnah. The Houthi invasion left the fenced-in cemetery in devastating condition, and Magdi warned Henfield to take pictures quickly to avoid attracting unwanted attention. Moving on to the rest of the city, Henfield saw Aden’s old Jewish quarter, as well as its new Jewish cemetery, which, like so much else in Yemen, was severely damaged by the Houthis. Remnants of Aden’s colonial past were evident as Magdi drove Henfield through the city, and they completed their tour with a visit to Sira Fortress, an 11th century complex located on a high hill overlooking the city, as well as the Arabian Sea port, once heavily used by traders heading to India.

Throughout his day in Aden, Henfield found himself thinking of a Yemenite Jew he knew from Cleveland — Adiv Sharabi. Sharabi was among the many Jews who left Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a to be airlifted to Israel between 1949 and 1950, when the Jewish community left en masse.  It took a month for Sana’a’s many residents to make their way to Aden; some walked and others rode on donkeys.

“He was six years old at the time and he told me how the Jews were robbed on the way by Arabs,” recalls Henfield.  “Many didn’t make it and had to be buried on the side of the road. It was a very tragic story.”

Shifting Sands

Henfield hit the ground running on his second day in Yemen, taking a four a.m. flight from Aden to Seiyun Airport, located in the country’s Hadramout region. A one-hour plane ride from bustling Aden, Hadramout felt a world apart, with mountainous deserts covering some 74,000 square miles. Henfield spent the remainder of his time in Yemen exploring the region, knowing that he wouldn’t be visiting any of the villages where Jews had once lived. Still, he was hoping that over the course of his time there, he might find some vestiges of Yiddishkeit.

“I knew that there had once been prominent Jewish families in Hadramout, with well-known names, but that a lot of them had converted to Islam,” says Henfield.  “It happened maybe 300 years ago, and it was a slow process.”

One name that was familiar to Henfield was the Ben Katami family, who according to Henfield’s research, was famous for the silver jewelry they made, as well as their jambiyas, short daggers with curved blades. Providentially, Magdi knew of the family and had a friend who was a descendant of the Ben Katamis, even though the Jewish connection wasn’t something he had ever contemplated.

“He put me in touch with his friend who told me that his ancestors had been Jewish and he was very proud of that even though he and his relatives were all Muslims,” notes Henfield.

Daggers weren’t the only weapons that figured into Henfield’s trip to Hadramout. While one might picture a Middle Eastern shuk as an open-air bazaar where you can purchase locally- sourced items such as halvah, spices, fresh fish, and hookahs, the market Henfield visited in Seiyun was devoted to guns, with AK-47s retailing for approximately 3,000 US dollars.

“Anyone could come in and buy whatever they wanted,” observes Henfield, who held several large rifles.  “By and large, folks here carry rifles.”

The market also sold ammunition and gun accessories, as well as knives.  Somehow, despite being surrounded by weaponry in a Level 4 country, Henfield felt surprisingly safe.

“It’s very common for everyone in Yemen to see folks with guns,” explains Henfield, who is a gun owner, as are many of his friends. “No one was confrontational, and everyone was nice.”

Arid Architecture

IT may be located more than 7,000 miles away from New York City, but Hadramout has some pretty impressive skyscrapers of its own. The city of Shibam, which has been in existence for 1,700 years, consists of approximately 500 mud-brick multi-story towers, earning it the distinction of being named the oldest skyscraper city by Guinness World Records.

Shibam’s original buildings were destroyed in the 16th century by massive flooding, and the city was rebuilt on a rock that offered better chances of surviving high waters, although many of its homes have been rebuilt numerous times over the last few centuries. With the threat of rival tribes and other enemies always present, Shibam is enclosed on all four sides, the outer walls offering an extra layer of protection. The city itself is a marvel of ancient engineering, its high-rise residential towers soaring anywhere from five to twelve stories high. Some of the buildings are connected by bridges, providing escape routes should an enemy ever manage to breach its walls.

Dubbed “Manhattan of the Desert” by British explorer Freya Stark in 1930, Shibam’s construction is a testament to practicality. The lower floors of its towers were typically used to shelter livestock and store grain, and in some buildings, the higher floors were used for communal socializing.  Even the tightly packed layout of the city was intentional — offering shade for most of the day, an incredibly important factor for those living in the punishing desert heat.

It was in Shibam that Henfield struck paydirt in his quest for Jewish artifacts. He searched for, and located, the magnificent eight-story home that he had been told once belonged to a Jewish family. Just across from the now unoccupied building, Henfield found a small antique shop whose inventory included two Jewish items, both adorned with magen Davids and menorahs — an old-fashioned bowl used for crushing corn, and a folding shtender that the owner assured Henfield had been used by Jews. The shtender was said to be 100 years old, although whether the shopkeeper was being truthful is anyone’s guess. Still, it caught Henfield’s eye and he bought it for $30.

“I knew I was getting ripped off, but I wanted it,” says Henfield.

Living Large

Poverty is rampant in Yemen, but Henfield definitely got an opportunity to see how the other half lives, or lived. There were mansions aplenty, as well as multiple palaces scattered throughout the Hadramout region, most of which were abandoned.

Henfield’s travels took him to the seven-story structure known as the Seiyun Palace, once the home of the Sultan of Kathiri. One of the world’s largest mud-brick buildings, the palace reportedly holds artifacts dating back to the Stone Age, and its likeness appears on Yemen’s highest denomination, the 1,000-riyal banknote. Henfield also saw the abandoned mansions that once belonged to wealthy Sufi merchants in the town of Tarim and the restored and colorized eight-story Buqshan Palace in Hayd Aljazeel, originally built in 1789.

Also on Henfield’s list of must-see edifices in Hadramout was a fortress-like building in Al-Khuraibah that took up an entire city block, which has been unoccupied since the 1970s, but was once the home of Osama bin Laden’s family. The likeness of a skull of a deerlike animal with curling horns protruding into the air was built into one corner of the turret-topped house, an embellishment that was likely made to acknowledge the prominence of hunting in the local culture.

Both the bin Laden and the Buqshan families were extremely wealthy and spent most of their time in Saudi Arabia, with their massive homes in Hadramout used as secondary residences.  The two families collaborated to build a highway that connected the towns of Hadramout to the southern port city of Al Mukalla, which drastically cut down travel time for those living in the region.

Just Desserts

Not surprisingly, there are no kosher pizzerias, bakeries, or anything even remotely similar in Yemen, but Henfield is a pretty low-maintenance kind of guy when he travels. He brings along beef sticks, beef jerky, bread, granola bars, crackers, tuna, and peanut butter, and supplements his stash with local fruits and vegetables.

As he toured Yemen, Henfield found himself in the occasional restaurant where his guide and security guard dined.  Like the Aden airport, the restaurants offered floor-only seating, which Henfield found massively uncomfortable as he sat on the side eating his homemade fare. The food served in Yemen wasn’t the only part of the meal experience that was decidedly different.

“Their food was three things on the menu, all sharing,” notes Henfield. “They had a massive platter of chicken and rice and everyone ate with their hands. There is no cutlery, no plates, nothing.”

That same simple vibe was evident during the many hours that Magdi drove Henfield through the Hadramout region, where goats roam freely, female herders wear wide-brimmed madhallah hats that measure up to two feet in diameter to stay cool in the desert sun, and roads are sparse, if they exist at all.

“At one point, we were driving and the road just disappeared,” says Henfield.  “The road had washed away in a flood ten years ago, and it was never repaired.”

Despite the many miles he covered as he toured Hadramout, Henfield was unable to get to Habban, a town in the region that he would have loved to be able to add to his itinerary, if only it were closer. Approximately two years ago, Henfield bought a renovated antique sefer Torah while on a trip to Israel. Upon his return to Cleveland, Henfield took pictures of Az Yashir in the Torah and sent it to Rabbi Yehoshua Yankelewitz, an American expert on ancient Torahs who lives in Bayit Vegan, Jerusalem, to learn more about his purchase.

“He was able to identify the Torah as being 280 years old with the style of safrus from Kaban,” says Henfield. “But it was far away and controlled by the Houthis, so I wasn’t able to go there.”

At one time, the Houthis let people into their territory, but those days are long gone. Magdi told Henfield that he had once been hired by a woman who was touring Yemen alone, and she offered to pay him $10,000 to take her into the Houthi-controlled portions of the country.

“They don’t allow anyone in,” Magdi explained to Henfield. “They don’t want anyone to know what is going on there.”

Ideally, Henfield would have loved to visit Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city, a place that many Jews once called home. But the area was under Houthi control and very much deserved the State Department’s do-not-travel warning, so Sana’a was clearly off limits. Similarly, Henfield is doing heavy research into Libya, the fifth and final stage of his second travel quest — visiting all five countries of North Africa.  Safety is a serious consideration in many Arab countries, one that Henfield doesn’t take lightly.

Given that reality, Henfield feels good about his travels through the Middle East, even if he was unable to visit every place in Yemen that had some elements of Jewish history.  Instead, he appreciated the opportunity to hunt for vestiges of Judaism in the country’s safer parts.

“I felt like every possible little sliver or remnant of Judaism in the Hadramout region or in Aden,  I was able to see and experience,” says Henfield. “Of course, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose you could say that I missed the biggest part of what the Jewish community was, which was in Sana’a, but considering what a tourist is able to do in 2024, I feel like I really accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, locating vestiges of Judaism in the Arab world.”

You Went Where?

Gone are the days when taking a vacation meant going either to the Catskills or Miami. We live in a world where teenagers attend travel camps in Alaska, and Pesach programs are held in Dubai, Crete, and Georgia (the country, not the state), so traveling the globe isn’t all that unusual anymore. Still, it isn’t often that you hear about your neighbors going to Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, all places that Henfield has visited, and he is the first to admit that some people think he is crazy for traveling to the Middle East, because they consider it to be too risky.

“In reality, parts of Europe are not better, and many parts of the US are dangerous,” observes Henfield. “It seems that people apply broad assumptions to entire regions, where, in reality, things are a lot more complex.”

Henfield has found many places in the Middle East to be safe, and he has been welcomed warmly by people who were well aware of his religion. In other places, he has chosen to play things a little closer to the vest, and he always travels with a guide he feels he can trust.

And then there are those who respond to news of Henfield’s adventures with a mix of surprise, intrigue, and an undercurrent of something else.

“A lot of people I find are also curious about these places and would love to go there, but either they are too afraid or their wives are too afraid for them,” quips Henfield.  “But I’ve been doing these trips for years, so that people who know me, for the most part, have seen and heard my story.”

Grounded

Henfield had actually planned to scratch Yemen off his travel bucket list eight months earlier, hoping to do a quick stopover on his way home from Syria. With no reliable airports in Syria at the time of his trip, Henfield had made his travel arrangements through Jordan, and he drove from Damascus to Amman, where he planned to catch a flight to Yemen for a 24-hour visit.

Realizing that going to Syria with an American passport would be difficult, at best (and more likely, impossible), Henfield had booked his travel plans using an Austrian passport, credentials granted to him as the grandson of an Austrian Holocaust survivor under the Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz — the Austrian Citizenship Act. But as he stood on line waiting to board his flight in Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, Henfield was informed by a Yemenia Airways agent that he wouldn’t be allowed on the plane.

“I asked them what the problem was, and they said that the Austrian embassy had contacted the government and told them I needed special clearance,” recalls Henfield.  “The Austrian embassy was aware of my travels — I had to apply for a visa and get a security letter, and now they said I needed another letter.”

Henfield tried everything he could think of to resolve the situation. He contacted the guide he had booked for the trip, who had arranged all the necessary paperwork, and tried to convince the gate agent that he had all the mandatory documentation. His words fell on deaf ears.

“I never really understood what was going on, but it was clear that the Austrian government did not want me going to Yemen,” says Henfield. “Maybe they didn’t want to be responsible for me while I was there, and they must have figured the best way to ruin my trip was to make this happen within 24 hours of my flight to ensure I didn’t make it to Yemen.”

Realizing that it was going to take a Plan B to check the final Middle-Eastern country off his list, Henfield spent the night in a Jordanian hotel and then flew to Dubai for Shabbos, already formulating plans in his head for another trip to Yemen.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1027)