In the early years of the State of Israel, and especially in the fifties, thousands of babies and toddlers disappeared from their families
- families of immigrants who came to Israel and were housed in transit and absorption camps. About two-thirds of the children were from families of Yemenite immigrants. According to low estimates, in those years every eighth child of a Yemenite family disappeared. The remaining third of the children were from other Mizrachi families - Tunisian, Moroccan, Libyan, Iraqi and others – and a small number were children of families who immigrated from the Balkans. Thousands of testimonies by parents indicate a similar method: parents were asked to give their children to nurseries or hospitals under the pretext that there “they will be given more appropriate care.” Sometimes children were violently taken by social workers or nurses, placed in ambulances and forcibly transferred to these institutions. The parents were not allowed to stay with their children and were told to go home and to return only to breastfeed their babies. A few days later the parents were told that their child had died. The parents never saw their child’s body and were not allowed to take their child to be buried. In many cases, parents did not receive a death certificate or received it much later, retroactively. A few dozen children were returned to their parents after the latter’s fierce protests, but the fate of most of the children is unknown. Many appeals to law enforcement agencies, government offices and various officials were unsuccessful. The children were not located and proof of their deaths was not found. On the contrary: some of them were found years later in the bosom of other families.
The affair came to light again a few years later, when most of the families received draft orders from the IDF for the children pronounced as "dead." Over the years, and only after strong public criticism, official inquiries were conducted by the state. The first was an inter-ministerial joint committee of the Departments of Justice and Police, which operated between 1967 and 1968 (the Bahlul- Minkowski Committee). The Shalgi Committee, which was defined as a committee of inquiry and operated between 1984 and 1988, was the second committee. Only in the late nineties, after the protest of the late Rabbi Uzi Meshulam was the official investigative committee established, and it published its findings in 2001. Later a gag order was placed on all the committee’s materials, until 2066. All the committees concluded that most of the babies had died, and that the fate of about a dozen babies is unknown. The fact that the important materials of the investigation remained inaccessible and confidential for another seventy years creates serious resentment.
The manner in which the investigation committee dismissed the children's disappearance is deeply disturbing. The Committee found it necessary to note that in those years official records were improperly taken and were in evident disarray, in order to dismiss the records in which it was documented that the babies had not died. At the same time, it relied upon lists of infants’ deaths that were composed retroactively, and accepted such records as a credible and reliable source of information. The committee did not see fit to investigate why two important archives related to the affair were destroyed around the time this committee operated, and it was satisfied with the explanation that the archives were destroyed "by mistake." Moreover, the Committee focused on examining the claim of "establishment kidnappings," but did not consider that it is highly possible that the disappearance of the children was a phenomenon which took place in parallel channels, under the auspices of an indifferent establishment which looked the other way, rather than being a result of a direct instruction or an expressed intention of the establishment
The adoptees and the missing adoption flies
Over the years we learn of more and more stories of children who went missing, and at the same time - of adults who have discovered they are adopted, and are trying to locate their biological parents. The adoptees all speak of a similar experience - on the one hand the desire to find out who their real parents are, and on the other hand - the great difficulty of confronting their adoptive parents, who perceive this move as ingratitude and distrust. Even those who manage to overcome these difficulties, tell us that in fact it is impossible for them to locate the biological family - adoption files do not exist, or exist but contain only partial records, and this does not enable them to locate the biological family. Families seeking to locate their children who disappeared encounter similar problems: non-existent documents, incomplete records, forged signatures and procedures which block access to information (especially in the Ministry of the Interior). Even in cases where parents were able to locate their child, they cannot force the disclosure on the child, for both legal and emotional reasons.
The tragedy of the families and the adopted children is manifold – the many parents whose child was taken away and have passed away in recent years without ever learning of his/her fate; children who were separated from their parents and families, many forced into institutions and orphanages, believing that they were abandoned by their parents; siblings and entire communities that grew up in the shadow of this tragedy. The families continue to bear the pain of this affair even now – when the denial and concealment prevent them from finding out what happened to their loved ones, or from the chance of finding some comfort in discovering what occurred, and perhaps reuniting with their disappeared children and siblings.
Similar affairs from around the world
Similar affairs in the Western world, of removing babies and children from their parents, and handing them over to "more worthy" families or to institutions, have come to light in recent years. In Canada, Australia, and Switzerland children were taken out of families perceived as “backward,” and given to adoption or sent to an institution, as part of a policy of "assimilation" designed to re-educate those groups and eliminate their spiritual and cultural existence. In Ireland, young women who gave birth out of wedlock were forced to give their children up for adoption, imposed by Catholic institutions with the state’s approval. About 1,500 children and infants were taken from their families in the colony of Reunion and sent to France. They were falsely promised education and welfare there, but in practice they served as cheap labor, suffered psychological , physical, and sexual abuse, and were entirely cut off from their families. In Argentine, hundreds of babies of dissident parents were kidnapped during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. In Spain thousands of babies were kidnapped close to their birth and sold for adoption after the parents were told that their child had died. The kidnapping was committed for financial gain, and it involved nurses, doctors, private hospitals and nuns. In many cases, exposing the affairs resulted in media exposure and heavy public pressure that eventually led to procedures of inquiry, recognition and the acceptance of responsibility by the state.
In the affairs referred to here, several factors that enabled the deeds exist simultaneously – racism, and a patronizing attitude that assumes there are parents and families who especially deserve to raise children, and on the other hand – there are families who do not deserve to raise their children, "inferior" people from whom it is acceptable and even desirable to take away the children. Families from the “wrong” groups - poor families, families of low social status, single mothers or families with a different culture or a different political outlook - all these are seen as groups that cannot and do not deserve to raise their children. These affairs, like the disappearance of the children of Yemen, the East and the Balkans, can be termed "crimes of racism and patronising".
