In the state of Israel’s early years, a number of parents in immigrant transit camps were told that their babies had died.
Their families believe the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s, and were illegally put up for adoption to childless Ashkenazi families, Jews of European descent. A younger generation is demanding answers.
Ofra Mazor, 62, had been looking for her sister, Varda, for 30 years when she submitted her DNA samples to the Israeli genealogy company MyHeritage in 2017. Her mother, Yochevet, who is now deceased, said that she got to breast-feed her sister only once after giving birth to her in an Israeli hospital in 1950. She was told by the nurses that her newborn daughter had died. Ms. Mazor’s mother didn’t believe the nurses and had her husband demand their child back. He was never given the child.
A few months after submitting her DNA, Ms. Mazor received the call she’d been waiting for: A match had been found. Last January, the sisters were reunited. Varda Fuchs had been adopted by a German-Jewish couple in Israel. She was told at a young age that she was adopted. The sisters are part of a community of Israelis of Yemenite descent who for decades have been seeking answers about their lost kin.
Known as the “Yemenite Children Affair,” there are over 1,000 official reported cases of missing babies and toddlers, but some estimates from advocates are as high as 4,500. Their families believe the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s, and were illegally put up for adoption to childless Ashkenazi families, Jews of European descent. The children who disappeared were mostly from the Yemenite and other “Mizrahi” communities, an umbrella term for Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. While the Israeli government is trying to be more transparent about the disappearances, to this day, it denies that there were systematic abductions.
“I was sure I was Yemenite,” Ms. Fuchs, 68, said. “I felt it.” Ms. Mazor said finding her sister was like closing a circle. “Growing up we both knew that something was missing,” she said.
Following the nation’s founding in 1948, new immigrants to Israel were placed in transit camps, in harsh conditions, which were tent cities operated by the state because of housing shortages. Hundreds of testimonies from families living in the camps were eerily similar: Women who gave birth in overburdened hospitals or who took their infants to the doctor were told that their children had suddenly died. Some families’ testimonies stated that they were instructed to leave their children at nurseries, and when their parents returned to pick them up, they were told their children had been taken to the hospital, never to be seen again. The families were never shown a body or a grave. Many never received death certificates.
The issue captured national attention in 1994 when Rabbi Uzi Meshulam and his armed sect of followers barricaded themselves inside a compound in the town of Yehud for 45 days, demanding an official government inquiry to investigate the disappearance of the Yemenite babies. One of Rabbi Meshulam’s disciples was killed in a shootout with the police, and the rabbi and his other followers were sent to prison. At the time, almost all Israelis dismissed Rabbi Meshulam and the accusations as the wild-eyed conspiracy theory of a religious radical.
Rabbi Meshulam’s goal was partly achieved the next year when the Cohen-Kedmi Commission was created to examine more than 1,000 cases of missing children. It was the third formal commission of inquiry created by the Israeli government since the 1960s. In 2001, the commission concluded there was no basis to the claim that the establishment abducted babies. The findings stated that most of the children who were reported dead had died, but about 50 children were unaccounted for. All three commissions had similar conclusions. The committee’s conduct and credibility has been called into question by the families and legal experts.
Naama Katiee, 42, remembers hearing about Rabbi Meshulam as a teenager. She asked her Yemenite father about what happened, but he said he didn’t want to discuss it. She met Shlomi Hatuka, 40, on Facebook through Mizrahi activist groups and together they founded AMRAM, a nonprofit organization that has cataloged over 800 testimonies of families on its website.
Ms. Katiee and Mr. Hatuka are part of a movement among the younger generation of Israelis of Yemenite descent — and activists from the broader Mizrahi community — who are building public pressure in demanding explanations for the disappearances and acknowledgment of systematic abductions.
“They really thought they had to raise a new generation, which was separate from the old ‘primitive’ community,” Ms. Katiee said about the early state of Israel. During the years soon after the country’s founding, Jews in Israel emigrated from over 80 countries and from several ethnic groups, part of a national project focused on forging a common new Israeli identity. Recently arrived Yemenite and other Mizrahi Jews tended to be poor, more religious and less formally educated than the Ashkenazi establishment in Israel, who looked down on them and wanted them to conform to their idea of a modern Israel.
Ms. Katiee also points out that during this period, similar incidents were happening in other parts of the world. In Australia, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were forcibly removed from their families by the government. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the “Sixties Scoop” was a practice in Canada that led to the removal of Indigenous children from their communities and families, placing them with non-Indigenous families in the country and in the United States.
“This was a method of raising a new generation by separating, and by cutting off the connection to their origins,” Ms. Katiee said.
For years, families were told they were wrong to accuse the Israeli government of such malice. Mr. Hatuka said that many of the mothers interviewed by AMRAM, including his own grandmother who lost a child, were often conflicted about whom to hold responsible. “They love this country,” he said. “My grandmother knew that something was wrong, but at the same time she couldn’t believe that someone who is Jewish would do this to her.”
The parents’ claims have long been dismissed by some Israelis, who attribute the deaths to high infant-mortality rates and the harsh conditions of the camps. They also point to disorganized bureaucracy and poorly kept records as the reasons for many of the discrepancies that have caused turmoil for families looking for answers.
The issue continues to resurface because of sporadic cases of family members, who were said to have died as infants, being reunited through DNA testing, as well as a number of testimonies from nurses working at the time who corroborated that babies were taken. Because of lingering questions, in recent years the government has tried to be more transparent.
In 2016, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the three previous government commissions when he appointed a member of his cabinet, Tzachi Hanegbi, to re-examine the evidence. Mr. Hanegbi told Israeli TV: “They took the children and gave them away. I don’t know where.” He acknowledged that “hundreds” of children were taken without their parents’ consent, the first time such a public admission had been made by a government official. In December of that year, over 200,000 classified documents from the state archive were released, containing personal files of the children, hospital records and burial certificates.
Last year, the Israeli Parliament passed a law that would allow families to seek court-ordered exhumation of graves and the Knesset approved a bill that would allow families to request access to adoption files. Previously, only adopted children could access the records when they turned 18. But the slow process and discrepancies in the documents have aggravated an already deep mistrust between the state and the families.
Margalit Ronen, 92, was one of many who filed a complaint with the Cohen-Kedmi Commission. In 1949, Mrs. Ronen arrived in Israel from Iran while 8 months pregnant with twin girls. After she gave birth, the hospital released her, advising that she rest in the transit camp for a few days before taking the girls home. When she called the hospital to tell them she was coming for her babies, she recalled that the staff informed her: “One died in the morning and one before noon. There is nothing for you to come for anymore.”
Gil Grunbaum, 62, became aware of his adoption at age 38, when a family friend told his wife, Ilana, that he was adopted. Mr. Grunbaum tracked down his biological mother, an immigrant from Tunisia, who was told her son died during her sedated birth in 1956. Mr. Grunbaum’s adoptive parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He didn’t want to add more trauma to their lives, so he kept the discovery to himself.
When Leah Aharoni’s daughter, Hagit, turned 17, the army sent out two draft documents: one for her, and one for her twin sister, Hannah, who they were told had died after birth. This made Ms. Aharoni think that her daughter might still be alive.
She began searching for records, and she found a document stating that two babies were transported to Tel Aviv, after Hannah was said to have died. Additionally, she found a second death certificate, which was dated three years after she was told her daughter had died. Ms. Aharoni said that she then went to consult her father, a respected rabbi in the community, who dismissed her suspicions. “You are not allowed to think that about Israel; they wouldn’t take a daughter from you,” she remembers him saying.
Yigal Yosef, the former mayor of Rosh Haayin, which has a large Yemenite population, remembers that a nurse visited his family when he was young. They said that his 6-month-old sister, Esther, had a cold and took her to the hospital. Days later, the family was told that she had died and had already been buried. He remembers being with his mother at Rambam Hospital in Haifa as she was screaming, “Bring me my daughter!” He says she was escorted out by force and never shown the body.
Years later, Mr. Yosef was asked to sit on the second government commission, known as the Shalgi Commission, as a representative for the families. The commission concluded that most of the children had died. “There was no meaningful proof,” he said. He also felt that the report was misleading, and he couldn’t bring himself to sign off on it, but “that didn’t matter to them,” he said.
“It outrages the younger generation, how their parents’ generation was treated,” Mr. Yosef said.
Many still struggle with accepting that something like this could happen. “Jews doing this to other Jews? I don’t know,” Yehudit Yosef, 91, said. Ms. Yosef took her son Rafael to the hospital with a fever in 1949. Days after, she received a call from a nurse saying that her son had died. Fifty years later, Ms. Yosef received a death certificate for her son. “They told me, ‘Sorry for the tardiness.’”
“They gave us a wound in our hearts for our entire lives.”
