On April 23, 1923 Shlomo Hillel was born in Baghdad, Iraq. He helped more than 100,000 Iraqi Jews come to Israel.Hillel was the youngest of Aharon and Hanini Hillel’s 11 children. The family was part of the large and ancient Iraqi-Jewish population, whose roots stretch back to at least the fifth century BCE. They left Baghdad for British Mandatory Palestine seven years before the Farhud, in 1934, when Hillel was 11 years old. Hillel attended Hebrew University and joined the Haganah when he was 23 years old. His first assignment with the Haganah was to oversee the construction of an underground bullet factory in Rehovot; the factory went on to produce over four million bullets.In 1946, the Haganah sent Hillel back to Iraq. He disguised himself as an Arab and spent a year covertly making arrangements for Iraqi Jews to migrate to Mandatory Palestine. He was even able to smuggle some immigrants out on trucks headed for Haifa.In 1950, Hillel, using the name Richard Armstrong, traveled back to Baghdad to negotiate on behalf of his fellow Iraqi Jews. The Iraqi government had passed a law that gave Jews a one-year period to leave Iraq legally, so long as they renounced their Iraqi citizenship and relinquished all assets. Hillel met with both Iraq’s Prime Minister and the head of Baghdad’s Jewish community to negotiate the terms by which Jews were allowed to leave. They agreed to work with a travel agency and determined a fixed cost per person. Despite the negotiations, Jews were still limited in what assets they were allowed to bring. The press entitled the arrangement “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.” Through it, most of Iraq’s Jews registered for immigration, and by 1952, around 124,000 Iraqi Jews had come to Israel on 950 flights. Less than one percent of the population remained in Iraq after a 2,500-year presence.In 1952, Hillel married Temima Rosner and was elected as a Member of Knesset, where he served until 1959 and again from 1969 to 1992. In 1977, as the Minister of the Interior, Hillel signed the decree recognizing Ethiopian Jews within the country’s Law of Return. He was elected as the speaker of the Knesset in 1984, and in 1998, Hillel was awarded the Israel Prize, the country’s highest civilian honor. Shlomo Hillel passed away on February 8, 2021, at 97 years old.