The Disappeared Children of Israel

20.02.
2019 The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times
The Disappeared Children of Israel

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.
Photographs and Text by Malin Fezehai
Feb. 20, 2019
ROSH HAAYIN, Israel — 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/middleeast/israel-yemenite-children-affair.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Home… 1/16
20.02.2019 The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times
Ms. Fuchs, 68, left, and Ms. Mazor, 62, are sisters who were reunited through DNA testing in early 2018.
“It was like, ‘Now you can go on for our mother.’ She knows that I
found Varda.”
— Ofra Mazor
Ms. Mazor holding a photo album with her wedding picture next to an image of her sister, Ms. Fuchs, on her
wedding day.
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.
Yochevet Chayoon, Ofra Mazor's and Varda Fuchs's mother.
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.
Ms. Katiee in Moshav Magshimim, Israel.
“I thought that there was some kind of misunderstanding. I realized it

really happened, babies were taken.”
— Naama Katiee
Malin Fezehai
“They really thought they had to raise a new generation, which was separate from the old
ʻprimitive’ 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.
Bracha Nadav in her home in Rosh Haayin, Israel. She had a brother named Baruch, who she believes was
taken.
Ms. Nadav’s parents, Reena Vahab and Yichyeh Vahab, in 1961.
“Until the day she died, my mother didn’t forget this boy. She always
said, ‘They took a child from me, they took a child from me.’”
— Bracha Nadav
Ms. Nadav holding an issue of the newspaper Yediot Ahronot from 1994. The headline reads, “Children of
Yemen: New Testimonies."
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.
“I would see children that look sort of like my children, and I would
say, ‘Maybe that’s them?’ All the time, all my life, I have searched for
them.”
— Margalit Ronen
Mrs. Ronen, center, at her home in Holon, Israel, with her daughter, Esther, 70, left, and her son, Nissan, 69.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/world/middleeast/israel-yemenite-children-affair.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Hom… 10/16
Mr. Grunbaum found out as an adult that he had been adopted. He later found his birth mother, who had
been told he had died.
Mr. Grunbaum at age 2 with his adoptive parents.
“Everything is covered up still. And time is running out, our parents

are dying.”
— Gil Grunbaum
Avi Yerushalmi holding his family's Iranian passport from their arrival in Israel. The baby pictured, bottom
right, is Yafa, 6 months old. His family was told that Yafa had died of dehydration.
“We want to settle this for our mother who was overcome by this her
whole life. My mom was always asking.”
— Avi Yerushalmi
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.
Ms. Aharoni at her home in Kiryat Ekron, Israel.
“She was the big one, the one that they took. She was white,” Leah
Aharoni said. Then she pointed to her daughter, Hagit, in the living
room: “She was small and brown.”
Ms. Aharoni, right, with her daughter Hagit.
Ms. Aharoni, second from left, with her family in Aden, Yemen, in 1947.
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, ʻSorry for
the tardiness.’”
“They gave us a wound in our hearts for our entire lives.”
Yehudit Yosef at her house in Ra’anana, Israel.
Yehudit Yosef in 1965.
Noa Avishag Schnall contributed reporting.
Malin Fezehai, a visual reporter for the Surfacing column, has worked in more than 30 countries. Her
photographic work has the common denominator of displacement. @malinfezehai • Facebook
READ 109 COMMENTS

The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

20.02.

2019 The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times

Photographs and Text by Malin Fezehai

Feb. 20, 2019

Yochevet Chayoon, Ofra Mazor's and Varda Fuchs's mother.

Ms. Katiee in Moshav Magshimim, Israel.

“I thought that there was some kind of misunderstanding. I realized it

Ms. Nadav’s parents, Reena Vahab and Yichyeh Vahab, in 1961.

Mr. Grunbaum at age 2 with his adoptive parents.

“Everything is covered up still. And time is running out, our parents

Ms. Aharoni at her home in Kiryat Ekron, Israel.

Ms. Aharoni, right, with her daughter Hagit.

“They gave us a wound in our hearts for our entire lives.”

Yehudit Yosef at her house in Ra’anana, Israel.

Yehudit Yosef in 1965.

Noa Avishag Schnall contributed reporting.

READ 109 COMMENTS

You might also like