The uproar that engulfed Tel Aviv, last Saturday, following the demonstration of Eritrean refugees, and the call of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, on Tuesday, to Israel not to deport those accused of participating in the pogrom acts, brought the issue of Eritrean refugees to the world's attention.
For years, many Eritreans have been traveling to Israel, fleeing the situation in their country and making a dangerous journey.
Whereas Eritrea has been completely emptied of the "Jews" who came to it many decades ago from Yemen.
HE LIVES ALONE
However, one "Jew" is still there, living alone without his family and relatives in Asmara.
The seventy-year-old man, Sami Cohen, has lived since the 1950s in a small Jewish settlement of about 500 people.
But immigration, death and the revolution changed the whole picture. Cohen is now the last Jewish resident of Asmara.
The man previously confirmed in an interview with the French news agency that he takes care of the synagogue and the cemetery in the city, because there is no one to do so.
He also explained that his wife left with their daughters when war broke out again between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998.
He said then: "You know, I had a lot of friends and family, but they all disappeared."
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FROM YEMEN
The first Jews arrived in Eritrea from Yemen in the late 19th century, following Italian colonial expansion and new commercial opportunities.
Later in the 1930s they were joined by those who fled anti-Semitism in Europe.
Then some left with the establishment of the State of Israel.
But most of them left the country when fighting broke out in the mid-1970s, during Eritrea's 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia.
Since the country's official declaration of independence in 1993, Eritrea has been ruled by President Isias Afwerki with an iron fist.
It is also considered one of the most isolated countries in the world and is placed very low in the global ranking of press freedom, human rights, civil liberties and economic development.
According to statistics published in June, the number of Eritrean asylum seekers in Israel reached 17,850 people, most of whom arrived illegally from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula years ago, and a large number of them settled in poor neighborhoods in the coastal city of Tel Aviv.