In Honor of the Ashkenazi-run Tikvah ASF: Zionism is Still Racism: Current Developments in the Yemenite Babies Affair
David Shasha
Grave of Disappeared Yemenite Baby Opened as Family Looks for Answers
By: The Media Line
The grave of Yosef Melamad, whose family suspects that he was never buried there and was one of the babies of Yemenite origins alleged to have been given for adoption to Jewish families both in Israel and Jewish communities abroad, was opened on Wednesday following the approval of an Israeli court in order to examine the remains.
Family members of Yosef Melamad arrived at the Nachlat Yitzhak cemetery in Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning accompanied by medical anthropologists to test the remains in the grave that bears the headstone of the child referred to by the family as Yossi.
Yossi’s family suspects he was kidnapped by state authorities and put up for adoption without the family’s consent. This is a common theory about the unexplained disappearances of babies from more than 1,000 Yemenite families, which were unusually common in the early ‘50s. While the families were told that their babies had died, many of them did not see a body or receive a death certificate.
Yossi’s family had the grave opened in order to compare the DNA of the remains found in it to Yossi’s mother, Shulamit, who is still alive, in order to discover once and for all what happened to him.
Vered Driham, Yossi’s sister, said about the uncertainty that was ever-present in the family’s life due to the uncertainty of Yossi’s disappearance.
“My mom lost her husband in the 1948 war. A year later, Yossi was sick so she took him to the hospital. They told her to come back tomorrow and pick him up, but when she arrived there Yossi was gone. She asked the nurse where he went, and he told her Yossi died that night and they buried him,” Driham said.
“A few years later, when he was supposed to turn 18, we got a recruitment letter with his name on it. My mom said, ‘I told you he’s alive – and fainted. Ever since she used to say: ‘The Arabs took my husband, and the Jews took my son.’”
The story of Yosef Melamad is one of the hundreds of missing children which is known as the Yemenite Children Affair. The affair is one of the most controversial episodes in modern Israeli history, as many families suspect to this day that their children were taken and sent for adoption without permission. Between 3,000 and 4,000 babies were pronounced dead in the first years after Israel was founded, most of them from Yemenite families, as well as some of North African and Balkan origins.
When asked Driham what she thinks it would be like to discover that Yossi is still alive and to even meet him, she said, “We asked our mom before she lost her memory, ‘What would you feel if Yossi was alive, but he doesn’t want to see us?’ She always replied: ‘I just want to see him once, to know he’s okay. To see he married a Jewish girl. After that, I can rest in peace.’ In a way, I feel like this investigation is doing her will.”
Several state commissions of inquiry through the years have found that most of the children did, indeed, die of diseases and that there was no organized operation to kidnap children and put them up for adoption. The most recent probe, in 2001, acknowledged that some children may have been put up for adoption by individual social workers but not as part of a national effort. A $50 million compensation program was approved in 2021. Still, one of the documents about the affair was banned from publication; it is titled “Secret.”
“I based my appeal on a limited legal decree from 1997 which allowed opening graves for the investigation,” Nurit Koren, who was the head of the last investigation committee on the affair, said. Koren served as a lawmaker in Israel’s Knesset for the Likud Party between 2015 and 2019.
“There are still secret documents that should be revealed to the public, and I tried to open them when I was a member of parliament. The fact that they are still closed makes me think these children were sent to adoption because that grants secrecy on documents for 70 years,” she said. “It’s been 70 years; these documents should be revealed. I’m hoping to enter parliament again in these elections and fix that. The families deserve answers,” she added.
Driham still wonders what could have been for her family if Yossi’s death had been investigated decades ago.
“If we would have solved this 30 years ago things would have been different. My mom would have a different life had she not lived with this doubt for so long. It’s a little too late now for that, I feel,” Driham said. “And yet, here I am talking about him as if he’s alive. So, I guess I still believe there’s a chance.”
By the end of the day, the special team that dug up the grave found forensic evidence of a baby buried there. DNA samples of the remains will be compared to Yossi’s mother and sister, to see if they match. A final answer will arrive in a few weeks.
“Even if it is him, there’s still so much wrong that was done,” Driham said. “They never should have buried him like that, and never should have sent us the military recruitment letter, or told us he left the country. Someone messed up, and my mom paid with a life full of sorrow for that.”
The story is written by Adi Koplewitz and reprinted with permission from The Media Line
From Ynet News, July 29, 2022
Whitewashing History: Israeli Media and the Yemenite Babies Affair
By: Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber
Note: For those who have not yet read Professor Madmoni-Gerber’s excellent book Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair, I strongly recommend you do so.
For more information on the book:
DS
“We used to leave in the hospital healthy babies; the next day I would ask them ‘where
are the babies?’ and they said they are gone. They died. What do you mean died? They
were healthy. Nothing was wrong with them. Today when they say that they died, it’s not
true. They were sent for adoption, mostly to the U.S.”1 (Nurse Ruja Kuchinski, 1996)
The day my aunt Hammama emigrated fromYemen to Israel in 1949, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. When she returned from the hospital to the immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, the nurse who accompanied her in the ambulance held the baby in her arms and told my aunt to step down. When my aunt turned her back, the ambulance and drove off. She never saw her baby again.
My father, himself a Jewish immigrant from Yemen, said he and the rest of the family rushed to the scene minutes after they heard my aunt’s cry. He told me the story when I was a little girl, but only years later did I understand the magnitude and ramifications of this traumatic event. When I became a reporter, I heard similar stories from many families of Yemenite and other non-European ethnic groups. I learned that hundreds of Jewish families in the state of Israel were carrying this tragic narrative in their memory.
Through extensive research, and interviews with dozens of families, activists and journalists, I discovered that while the Israeli government and the public have tried to forget and silence this Affair, Yemenite families continue to suffer from their terrible loss. In this essay, I argue that public efforts to silence and deny this affair contribute to the ongoing intra-Jewish rift and racism in Israeli society today. Moreover, the question of if and how this story will be remembered in the public sphere will strongly influence the identity formation of Yemenite and Mizrahi children of future generations.
What is the Yemenite Babies Affair?
During the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to the early 1950s, hundreds if not thousands2 of babies disappeared from immigrant absorption and transit camps throughout Israel and from the transit camp Hashed in Yemen. According to testimonies given to the Kedmi Commission (1995–2001), the absorption policy governing Yemenite Jews required separating children from their parents because the stone structures housing the babies, called baby houses,4 were in better condition than the tents and tin structures that sheltered the parents.
Babies were usually taken from the baby houses without parental knowledge or consent. Parents who were present and refused consent reported that camp authorities forcefully took their children from them, even acting violently.4
Later testimonies revealed that a typical scenario was as follows: a baby was declared ill and taken to the hospital despite parental assertion that the child was healthy. The ostensibly ill baby was then taken to one of several institutions around the country, such as Wizo, an international women’s organization with recovery centers in Safad, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The parents were then told their babies had died, even as state institutional workers later testified that these “parents were not interested in their children.”
As more complaints were filed during the mid-1960s, the Affair gained more momentum each time, causing a public outcry that was quickly suppressed and forgotten. Despite numerous, suspiciously consistent allegations that babies were kidnapped and adopted by European Jews, or sold to Jewish families abroad, the state of Israel has refused to properly investigate the matter. The establishment’s efforts to silence the story was unwavering—an effort that would not have been possible without the media’s active cooperation.
The government appointed two inquiry commissions, in 1967 and 1988. Both operated behind closed doors, had limited authority and budget, no power of subpoena, and were not challenged by the press. In 1995, a public investigative commission, called in Hebrew Va’adat Hakira Mamlachtit, was finally appointed after a public protest turned violent, by Rabbi Meshulam and his organization.
This commission, however, was not what the Yemenite community had hoped for. In his legal analysis of the Kedmi Commission’s conclusion (2002, 48), Law Professor Boaz Sanjero wrote: “My main conclusion, based on acceptable legal text analysis, is that the Commission’s work is lacking the most fundamental basis for investigative work: epistemology of suspicion.”
According to Sanjero, suspicion of criminal acts was not considered at any stage of the Commission’s work. Rather, he said, the Commission was engaged in “a discussion” about this Affair, which can be read as a verification of the establishment’s discourse.
Zionist Narrative and Media Discourse
The historical review of the Babies Affair raises questions about Western domination, national identity, “otherness,” memory, and how dissenting voices were silenced. With the exception of a few critical narratives in Haolam Haze in 1967 and Ha’ir, Haaretz and Channel Two in the mid-1990s, denial ruled the media coverage.
Articles were mostly aligned with the government’s versions of events instead of challenging it. As a result, the media produced a narrative that obfuscate, rather than investigated the Affair. Haolam Haze was not only the first media outlet to bring the story to the attention of the public as a phenomenon, but also the only one to frame the story as a narrative of kidnapping. The magazine reported that the kidnapped babies were sent abroad for adoption at a cost of $5,000 US per child.
This alternative coverage, however, paled in relation to the overwhelming narrative that supported the government’s denial.
The media was also instrumental in framing the Affair as a “Yemenite problem.” The title: “The Yemenite Babies Affair” ultimately turned this affair into a Yemenite problem, thus never transforming the discourse to questions of State and society’s responsibility.
As Cornel West argued in Race Matters (1993), part of the barrier in the public discourse about race is the view of black people as “problem people.” This framework, West says, is paralyzing. It prevents society from dealing will the more crucial question of “what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation.”
The media discourse about this Affair demonstrates the power of Zionist meta- narrative (Shohat 1988) to drive what Stuart Hall terms “strategies of representation.”
The narrative of the Babies Affair is rejected because it contradicts the notion of Jews as victims.
It forces us to acknowledge that Jews have victimized other Jews, on a racial basis and within a decade of the Holocaust. The mostly Ashkenazi controlled media was not going to allow this voice to be heard. As activist Rafi Shubeli explains, some vital questions were absent from the media discourse:
How is it possible that in a democratic state, so many people are living with an unresolved pain for so long? Why is Yemenite pain not legitimate?
One of the main strategies used by media organizations was denying access to Yemenites families and activists seeking further investigation and demanding answers from authorities all the while magnifying testimonies of state representatives, thus weakening the Yemenite community.
Ilana Dayan, prominent journalist and host of the show Uvda on Channel Two, was one of few journalists to break this silence. She said:
There is a gap between the depth of the pain, the magnitude of the Affair, and the media treatment…The ability to prevent the Yemenites from effective form of expression for so long is unbelievable. Especially because we think of ourselves as an open society, but the truth is that different groups in society have no access to power focal points and effective forms of expression.
Yemenites as “Others”
To uncover the powerful ideology behind the narrative of this Affair, one must examine the Orientalist assumptions that marked Yemenites as “Others” and served as the basis for constructing this discourse. Some media narratives even blamed parents for not wanting their children, or worse, justified the kidnapping as an act of charity, to better the future of theses babies.
In the 1960’s, articles on the Affair portrayed Yemenite Jews as at once exotic and inferior; primitive people in need of rescue and enlightenment. In a Davar article in 1966, for instance, Yemenite parents were described as seeing “for the first time in their lives how to bathe a baby and how to change a baby’s diaper.” (Davar, February 24, 1966)
Absorption camp staff told the press and the Kedmi Commission that Yemenite Jews were not terribly upset when told their children died, interpreting the Yemenites’ religious belief and their tendency to internalize pain as a lack of care. “If a child died in the tent, they would say, ‘God gives and God takes’” (Davar, February 26, 1966).
Moreover, the ideological assumption that Zionism “rescued” Mizrahim, justified abduction and adoption.
Ahuva Goldfarb, head nurse of the Absorption Camp Baby Houses, went so far as to say, “Maybe we did them a favor” (Madmoni, 1996). The Yemenites were dehumanized beyond the categories of us/them, and became inhuman “things”. Head nurse Sonia Milshtein shocked the Commission when she referred to Yemenite babies as “packages” and “carcasses.” (Ha’ir, October 27, 1995).
When asked if, as a mother, she could understand the families’ pain, she replied: “Oh, I’ve heard this too much lately. After forty years I would have been happy that my child got a good education and a good family. Yes, that is how I would feel” (Yoman, July 21, 1995).
When Sara Perl, chair of Wizo-Israel, testified to the Kedmi commission, she also claimed her supervisor said parent didn’t claim their children because “they just don’t want their children, they have too much going on” (Ha’ir, November 3, 1995).
In its final report, the investigative commission concluded that thousands of Yemenite parents deserted their own children. Sanjero’s criticism of the commission’s report notes that only Yemenite parents were blamed.
No other parties were held accountable for separating thousands of babies from their families, or the burial of babies without the knowledge or presence of their parents (if they had indeed died).
The blame for not searching hard enough or neglecting their children forced parents to defend themselves from false accusations as they relived their tragic losses. In Tzipi Talmor’s documentary Down—A One Way Road (1997), the following heartbreaking testimony was given by Shlomo Bahagali, a Yemenite parent who searched for his son Hayim for 50 years:
I am talking to you, Hayim; this was not my fault. This is the fault of the people in charge. It isn’t at all like they said that we were not interested in the babies. It is a cruel lie. That is why I am talking to you, Hayim; please in God’s name, if you hear me, your ID number is 64703, please come back to me, let me rest in peace. I need to know that you are alive wherever you are.
Lack of Closure Future Cost
The unresolved tragedy of the Yemenite Babies Affair will not fade with time, as some state leaders hope.
The wounds of long-suffering mothers and fathers only deepen as the younger generations see the injustice wrought upon their families and community. The kidnapping of my aunt’s baby remains a vivid memory.
Many people of my generation have made an unbreakable connection with the past and vowed to fight for the recognition of their parents’ narratives.
To avoid consequences stemming from civil discontent, more dialogue is needed. The state and the public must fully listen and truly regard parents’ narratives; they have a right to be heard. As noted historian Howard Zinn wrote in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress: “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past…”
Moreover, in the absence of dialogue about the transgressions of the past, acts of oppression reoccur. As Esther Hertzog (2005) noted, there is a direct connection between the kidnapping of Yemenite babies in the 1950s and what she calls the systematic removal of children from their families in Israel today. “…Children are still a resource for the government to maintain its power... all the while using rhetoric and ideology that justifies any means including violence by the controlling institutions, all the while denying any responsibility for these actions” (12).
Hertzog’s analysis demonstrated how state welfare and absorption organizations infantilized Ethiopian immigrants for their own benefit, for instance, despite good intentions. Major decisions, such as the children’s education, were once again made without consulting parents. Hertzog claimed the integration of Ethiopian families into Israeli society was influenced by the same Eurocentric biases that dominated the absorption of Mizrahi and Yemenite Jews in the 1950s. Both were seen as “traditional” societies in need of rescue and enlightenment.5 Hertzog noted that “behind this image of patronage and responsibility lies also the suspicion and anxiety about criticism” (38).
To date, more than 1,000 complaints have been filed with one or more of the three commissions investigating the Yemenite Babies Affair. Despite the many legal problems with the final commission’s report, the numbers are still horrifying, making the often-cavalier attitude of decision makers and the media even more shocking.6
The state and the media have told Yemenite parents and other Mizrahim that their experiences, memories and pain are not relevant. No society can build a healthy future with such a stained past. Yael Tzadok, a journalist who investigated the affair for the Voice of Israel explained:
Organized crimes performed by people against other people of their own nation have occurred all over the world, including similar affairs where babies were used as an “asset” that is negated from “unworthy” families and granted to “more worthy” ones (in Canada, Argentina, Australia). We didn’t invent it. Yet, while other countries have started a process of revealing the truth, listening to the victims, healing the wounds and heading towards forgiveness and reconciliation, here in Israel we won’t even admit that it happened. We believe that we, Jews, are more moral than other nations… And yet here we are, with our own homemade racism… What does it say about the Jewish state? This is why you find massive silencing from the government and the press. We are a society that lives with a very big gap between what we pretend to be and what we really are.
Notes
1. The nurse was audio taped by Avner Farhi, whose sister was kidnapped from Ein-Shemer Camp in 1950.
2. Over 1,000 complaints were submitted to all three commissions combined. Rabbi Meshulam’s organization claimed to have information about 1,700 babies kidnapped prior to 1952 (450 of them from other Mizrahi ethnic groups) and about 4,500 babies kidnapped prior to 1956. These figures were neither discredited nor validated by the last commission. Shoshi Zaid, The Child is Gone [Jerusalem: Geffen Books, 2001, 19–22).
3. During the immigrants’ stay in transit and absorption camps, the babies were taken to stone structures called baby houses. Mothers were allowed entry only a few times each day to nurse their babies.
4. See, for instance, the testimony of Naomi Gavra in Tzipi Talmor’s film One Way Road (1993) and the testimony of Shoshana Farhi on the show Uvda (1996).
5. For Shohat, the kidnapping formed part of the broader Eurocentrism of the Zionist Enlightenment discourse of progress and modernization, viewing itself as rescuing Middle Eastern Jews (Shohat 1988). See also her analysis in “The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: the Case of the Mizrahim” Critique 10 (Spring 1997).
6. These findings were often presented to the public as low numbers, as if “only 69” missing babies could be accepted and forgotten
From Left Curve, Number 35, 2011, re-posted to SHU 525, April 18, 2012
The Yemenite Babies: How I Missed the Smoking Gun
By: Mike Dagan
Seeing things from an ethnic viewpoint means that when
someone brings an Ashkenazi editor a story about the kidnapping of Yemenite
children (apparently at the hands of Ashkenazim), it sounds like a baseless
conspiracy theory. Perhaps this gut response stems from the whiff of blame in the
offing, or maybe it is just part of the healthy editorial skepticism that
protects us from printing hoaxes. But, if you'll grant me the benefit of the
doubt, I would like to blame my Ashkenazi-ness for the fact that I missed a
pretty good newspaper story (and isn't it just utterly Ashkenazi to blame your
own ethnicity?).
Fifteen years ago, when reporter Avihu Ratzabi, who covered the Ra'anana beat
for the local Tzomet Hasharon newspaper, where I worked as news editor,
maintained that there were small, unmarked graves in the area that in fact
contained the remains of missing Yemenite children, naturally, I thought he was
mistaken. I also thought that even if he was right, who knew how such a thing
could be proved, not to mention how to turn it into a solid newspaper story.
All of this happened, of course, before the commission of inquiry into the
kidnapping of Yemenite children published its conclusions, to the effect that
no proof of kidnapping could be found.
In March 1994, trying to convince me and the newspaper's editor-in-chief at the
time, Dan Dolberger, that the claims were true, Ratzabi brought us to the place
that would soon become a battleground: the fortress-like home in Yehud of Rabbi
Uzi Meshulam, who had decided he would be the one who would force the
government to come clean on the kidnapping scandal.
I remember Meshulam talking in his living room about amazing documents, said to
be lying in a safe to which he had access, which would shock the entire
country. I recall his talk about an army of Yemenite warriors, just waiting for
him to give the orders (it was not clear at what time, nor even what orders,
for that matter). These remarks were a little disturbing, but not to the extent
that any one of us took them too seriously, at least not the Ashkenazim among
us (or at least not the Ashkenazi writing these words). Mostly I remember the
fact that we never got to see even one page of all this astonishing evidence
said to be locked inside the safe.
Apparently no commission of inquiry can completely put to rest the questions
raised by the affair, but, as I have said, we were not shown any evidence. It
really was difficult to establish a direct link between the small, unmarked
graves in Ra'anana and missing Yemenite children.
But the underlying story wouldn't go away; it remained right there in front of
my eyes. The story about the rabbi in the partially fortified house, surrounded
by a barbed-wire fence topped with a surveillance camera, who claimed to lead a
flock of armed Yemenite admirers, turned out to be painfully true - like a gun
flashed in a play's first act - that I decided not to publicize. Of course, two
acts later, the gun was fired.
When you are on the lookout for a good story, you don't need dynamite to
conduct the investigation of the century. Sometimes all it takes is for you to
open your eyes and look at what's standing right in front of you.
From Haaretz, April 28, 2009, re-posted to SHU 368, June 3, 2009
Yalde Teman: The Disappearance of Yemenite Babies During the Aliyah of 1949-1954
By: Sampson Giat
When the Jews of Yemen were told to gather in Aden, on the southern coast of Yemen, to board planes on a flight to Israel, they sold or just left their homes, bundled their books and began the long trek across the Arabian Desert. Seeing planes for the first time, they persevered by holding onto their precious children.
Upon arriving in Israel from Yemen, many immigrant families suffered a loss of one or more children under suspicious circumstances. These families relate similar stories: their child was brought to the sanitary children’s house, where they slept in the Maabara, (a transit camp.) The mothers went there to breast feed their children. After a period of time, the family was informed that their child had died; the family was never given a death certificate for the child, nor was the family shown a body or a grave.
To kidnap over a thousand Yemenites at will is to dehumanize a segment of Israel’s countrymen. Didn’t the authorities feel the pain of the parents? What Zionist ideology gave them the right not to return babies to their biological parents from clinics and hospitals? To say there was ‘confusion in those days’ is the lamest of excuses. There were professional doctors, nurses, sanitary children’s quarters and records of every tent, blanket, bed, dishes and utensils. Could they lose a human being so easily?
Eighteen years later, the families whose children had “died,” received letters from the Defense Ministry. Their children were told to appear for induction into the army. This occurred to so many families that two ‘official’ investigations were conducted into these missing children. The Bahalul Minkovsky Investigation 1967-1969 and the Shalgi Committee 1988-1994. They were to report on only 650 children who were kidnapped during this period. Others have estimated that the number of these children is in the thousands – and most of them were of Yemenite nationality.
What is so disappointing is that the leaders of Israel in those early days did not understand that the Yemenite Jews came to Israel out of a strong feeling for redemption. This was their return to Zion. Not that conditions in Yemen were so great, but they were not running away from a history of extermination. They knew they were a direct line to the ancient Israelites and were returning from where they originated. No other Jewish community immigrated with such messianic Zionist fervor as the Yemenites. They could have been the most devoted and patriotic citizens of Israel- as compared to the Ashkenazi Satmar and Neturey Karta sects.
The issue of Yalde Teman is not a cheerful subject for me to talk about. For me it was extremely painful to learn about the reprehensible treatment of Yemenite Jews by the Ashkenazi authority and their subordinates. Modern Israel is not a ‘Light Unto the Nations.’ I now understand the early philosophy of Zionism. It was to be a beacon for the ingathering of Jews within the safety of a civilized democracy, meant only for Ashkenazi Jews.
First I will give an overview of the background of the Yalde Teman issue up to the time I was elected President of the Yemenite Jewish Federation in 1993. Then I shall give more details with relevant documents in order to corroborate what I had personally witnessed. And end with how I discovered Tzila Levine, a kidnapped person who I brought together, with her biological mother after forty nine years.
Although these two investigations had government approval, the Israeli government never gave the investigators adequate authority to solve this horrific tragedy. Neither investigation was conducted in an open public fashion. Neither was empowered to subpoena records or to compel testimony under penalty of perjury. The government’s lack of progress, coupled with alleged threats by the Israeli secret police against reporters and others who had taken up the cause of these suffering families, had led many in Israel to believe that the government was covering up the fate of these children to conceal its own involvement in their disappearance.
PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT
When I was elected President of YJFA in 1993, I started to collect boxes full of evidence and a number of documents, many of which I have submitted to my memoir. I include interviews with mothers whose children disappeared, and official documents recording that their children reported as dead, were very much alive decades later. They were either taken out of the country, or were called up for army service when they would have reached the age of eighteen. There are two letters of resignation from Shalgi Committee investigators. They were purposely prevented from conducting conclusive investigations. The two investigators, David Levy and Meier Hefer resigned eight months apart.
I have no doubt their employment was to placate the Yemenite parents with the impression that something was being done.
Also included are documents retrieved from the Ministry of Interior showing missing babies very much alive, illegally adopted, and taken out of the country after these innocent mothers were told that their infant had died.
ARNON NAVOT
In 1985, Arnon Navot, a high-ranking policeman, was the head of the country’s missing persons’ bureau. There was increased pressure on Prime Minister Shimon Peres to have another committee investigation after the lack of results of the former Bahalul Minkovsky Committee came up with only 342 missing children. Afterwards, 600 more children’s names were added.
Peres, rather than forming another government committee instructed Arnon Navot to head a task force with two others. Since Peres had no intention of creating a public committee, he did not give Navot the tools necessary to investigate.
Navot claims that his superiors put hurdles in front of him. He was not allowed to store information on his computer; his official car was taken from him so that he had to carry loads of documents on public transportation.
Navot found evidence that a child, whose parents were told he had died, had been illegally adopted by a family in Belgium. His superiors would not allow him to follow up on his findings.
Navot was convinced that Shimon Peres, like most politicians, was afraid of the political fallout resulting from any discoveries. The cover up started.
AVIGDOR PEER
Mr. Avigdor Peer was the former Assistant Director of the Division for Aid to Immigrants of the Ministry of Social Welfare. He broke thirty years of silence by informing the Knesset Interior Committee on November 27, 1985, that on his watch, “tens of hundreds of babies were taken from baby shelters in absorption camps. They were also taken from hospitals and clinics and given to four women’s organizations: Working Mothers of Mapai, Agudah Women, Amunah Women (NRP), and the General Zionists Women’s Organization. The MAPAI being the largest organization received the greatest number of children according to party distribution. These political parties needed children for the future to populate the kibbutzim their party controlled”.
Abraham Sternberg published a book in 1973 titled “A PEOPLE IS ABSORBED.”
On Page 76 he wrote:
“The late Dr. Yossef Israeli was in charge of the Southern District for Medical Services of new immigrants. He transferred tens of hundreds of children from the hospital to the World Zionist Organization’s Children’s Home in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tsfat.”
“Often the children stayed there for many months. Ambulances were used with nurses accompanying them. World Zionist Organization Institutions were constantly filled with many Yemenite children.”
TESTIMONY OF WITNESSES TO THE KIDNAPPING OF YEMENITE CHILDREN IN ISRAEL FROM 1949-1956
ABRAHAM OVADIA
Abraham Ovadia was in charge of Camp Aleph in Rosh Ha’Ayin. He is now 86 years old and has volunteered to give his testimony. He says his conscience does not allow him to go on with his life without telling the truth. He lives in Jerusalem.
“I will tell you what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Many children, boys and girls were kidnapped. Their ages were one year old, six months old, two weeks old, and even one week old. It was a shocking scene to see parents looking for their stolen children, being told they were sick and might be dead. They never realized it would be the last time they would see their children. These criminals were very organized. The organization included different agents: doctors, nurses, drivers, and the people who bought the children. Some of the children who were kidnapped were just born and the mothers didn’t even have a chance to breast feed them. I knew these kidnappings were organized and I knew that everything was not done by a single man, but instead by a group involved with the Jewish Agency
It is hard to believe that a woman who had been pregnant, gave birth, and breast-fed, would be lying when she cried: ‘They have kidnapped my child.’ This just cannot be her imagination.”
A NURSE: YEHUDIT DORANI
Worked in Ein Shemer, Israel Camp ‘C.’ and was interviewed on August 9, 1995,
Q. Tell us what you witnessed
A. “I noticed that foreign women came to play games with the children. Each woman checked the intelligence, hearing and sight of the children. I finally understood why they came here. They picked the best children to go with them!!”
“They tested their intelligence with toys. They stayed with the children for three days. Every day they were with the children after the children were breast-fed by their mothers. These foreign women stayed out of the mothers’ sight.” “I suspected that they waited till the mothers left and then they came to test the children. The children were not sick at all. The next day they sent the children to a hospital.”
“They were healthy. There was nothing wrong with them. I was with them the day before. These women were looking for high intelligence, good hearing and sight. I later realized these women came to buy these children. The mothers were told the children are in the hospital in Haifa. There was no reason for that. The children were not sick. I did not see sick children. The children did not return. None of them returned. The children were not sent back to the camp. I never saw them again”.
THE SHALGI COMMITTEE
Because of the outrage at the cover-up by the Israeli government, Yemenite parents and their second-generation children put pressure on the leaders to form a second investigative committee.
In 1988 Judge Shalgi, a former Supreme Court Justice, was put in charge of a whitewash group of men who for six years would not subpoena any of the people responsible for the kidnappings. They investigated over 680 missing children. The Committee was so sloppy and inconclusive that a member of the committee, Yigal Yosef, the Mayor of Rosh Ha’Ayin refused to sign the final protocol presented to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in January 1995.
A case in point, on page 210, Shalgi claims that Shoshana Parchi is buried in Ein Shemer Cemetery in 1950 of the transit camp. Elsewhere, he claims 30 other children were also buried in Ein Shemer.
MY FINDINGS
In February 1996 I went to see for myself, and traveled there with that child’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Parchi who were still looking for their child. Ein Shemer was the immigration camp in which the parents were living when they arrived in Israel in 1949. The mother said to me, “Shimshon, there was no cemetery here in 1950. My daughter could not have been buried here in 1950.” The Parchi parents are elderly and I could not just take their word for it. I told myself not to believe anything until I had actual proof. There is a clinic for old people built on the grounds of what used to be the Ein Shemer immigration camp. So I went to see the director of the clinic Nathan Adini. I asked Mr. Adini about the cemetery. He said there was no cemetery here in 1949. The cemetery you see here was built in 1957. From 1957 until today there are absolutely no children buried here, only old people from the clinic are buried. He showed me the roster of burials. I studied the book; there were no children buried there.
Now judge Shalgi presented an official government report that tells P.M. Rabin and the Israeli government that the babies were buried at Ein Shemer when there was no cemetery. And their findings are based on their research. Well this judge should be indicted as a criminal for reporting such a lie to bereaved parents. There are people like that in this world. They have a high position in government, and want to remain in that high society. They know they have to play the game. And the way to play the game today is to cover up what happened in 1949 because this is a total embarrassment to the Israeli government.
MY LETTERS TO FORM A NEW GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE
On November 4, 1994 I wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin suggesting the establishment of an OPEN official Committee of Inquiry.
On February 14, 1995 I received a reply from Rabin’s legal advisor informing me that a new committee was approved. Judge Shalgi handed in his six year inconclusive report to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Meir Shamgar and a copy to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Prime Minister Rabin called the Yalde Teman Affair “one of the most painful in the history of the State of Israel.”
On January 22, 1995 I wrote to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Meir Shamgar, who had the responsibility of forming a new committee. I suggested that due to the importance of the committee, it should have the power to subpoena and be able to take testimony under the penalty of perjury.
On May 22, 1995 in a letter to Prime Minister Rabin, I followed up on my previous letter, suggesting a committee of seven, as I knew this was legal for just such an inquiry. Included should be academics, Rabbis, lawyers, and prominent Yemenites. I also suggested that they hire skilled private investigators and that the members of the Committee should be totally independent of the government.
Justice Shamgar only formed a three-person committee, two of whom were retired judges. The head of which was 82 years old. The other member was a retired general. All of the members were dependent on the government for their careers and pensions.
When I phoned the General, he told me they were to meet only three times a week and only for three hours, because the general had a back operation and could not sit for a longer time.
After Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, I sent a letter to his successor, Shimon Peres. This letter was crying out for justice, as I perceived another cover-up. This is all in my book.
RABBI UZI MESHULAM
Rabbi Uzi Meshulam is a Rabbi in the town of Yahud. He has many students who live in the West Bank. Most of them served as I.D.F. officers and were past members of elite fighting units, including officers in intelligence. It is legal for them to carry arms.
During the week of Pesach, March 24, 1994, the Rabbi’s students came to his house to sell their Chometz. A neighbor, with whom the Rabbi had an earlier dispute, saw many young men with firearms in the Rabbi’s yard. The neighbor called the police. This gave the police the opportunity to further harass the Rabbi for the twenty years Rabbi Meshulam had been collecting evidence of the systematic kidnapping of Yemenite children, which is damaging to the Israeli Government.
An army of police surrounded the Rabbi’s home and asked the students to come out from behind the Rabbi’s low fence. One student came out and was immediately arrested. They were not congregating illegally. Upon seeing their fellow student being arrested, the rest of them refused to come out. This created a standoff until May 11, 1994. That’s 47 days!!
The next idiotic scene could have been out of a Spielberg movie: “The Invasion of Normandy,” if it were not so comical. Hundreds and hundreds of police, sharpshooters with scopes, sappers with a canine S.W.A.T. team and helicopters flying over this tiny house, wanting to evict Rabbi Meshulam and his students. They had done nothing illegal, but to be with their Rabbi to sell their Chometz. These were not just Yeshiva Buchers, but soldiers with training and ideals. The stupidity of the Israeli government and police created a standoff of 47 days. Neither side would budge. It culminated in a siege by forces to strength unprecedented, against a private home in Israel. They cut off the electricity and the phone lines and started shooting indiscriminately into the house in which Mrs. Meshulam and her young children ages between 6 months and 5 years were sleeping. The bullets shattered the windows over the heads of the children. When I visited the home, I saw countless bullet holes in the venetian blinds, the living room walls and the bedroom walls.
Without any provocation, Shlomo Asulin a student and a sergeant in the IDF, was shot in the neck from behind, by a marksman using a telescope. He was trying to start a generator since the electricity was cut off. Court testimony proved Asulin never fired a weapon.
He was not dead, but bleeding profusely. A young man, Nathan Shifriss, picked up a megaphone and called out to the police to bring over an ambulance that was close by. The police refused, and as a result Shlomo Asulin bled to death.
Most Israelis familiar with the “Meshulam Incident” received their information only from newspapers and TV. There was a concerted effort by the government, the police and the media to discredit Rabbi Meshulam to a point of comparing them to the David Koresh Cult of 1993 called the ‘Branch Davidians.’ All of that was so far from the truth. Rabbi Meshulam and his students were subsequently arrested. Rabbi Meshulam received an eight-year sentence, and eleven of his students received six-year sentences for the crime of sedition. After appeals they were still languishing in jail, as though they were Israel’s most hardened criminals.
I received a letter from Yitzhak Nir, the warden of the Ramle Prison and signed by Rabbi Uzi Meshulam. I was requested to visit on April 13, 1996 and report on the conditions of their incarceration, and their two week hunger strike. Two of his students were already urinating and coughing up blood.
Before I got involved with Meshulam’s problem, I wanted assurances from Rabbi Shlomo Korach, Chief Rabbi of Bnei Brak, Rabbi Arussi, Chief Rabbi of Kiriat Ono and Rabbi Ariel Gamliel, Deputy Minister of Religion and member of the Knesset. In every instance, they assured me that Rabbi Meshulam is a bona fide Rabbi, who teaches students as they do. The fact that he is charismatic should not be held against him. For the past 20 years, Rabbi Uzi Meshulam has been paranoiac over the issue of Yalde Teman. He claims to have collected a great deal of material, much of which was from secret files. For two days I interviewed all the students individually in Ramle prison. They have corroborated seeing all the damaging evidence.
In my Memoir, I go into detail about the time I spent in Ramle prison with the Rabbi and his students. In all sincerity, if not for Rabbi Meshulam, the issue of Yalde Teman would never have reached the point where it is today, irrespective of the government trying to cover it up as it was embarrassed by the whole affair.
The media and government officials just do not understand how religious students can be attached to their Rabbi. If they spent time in Bnei Brak, they would have a better understanding. So the only thing they could understand was a misconception: that he formed a “cult,” and was making a lot of noise about kidnapped children.
Day after day, the media wrote about the “compound” that the Rabbi and his students hid in. If the police had allowed the media to get a closer look, they would have seen a simple home, a yard with a five-foot chain link fence; not a “compound.”
The media also painted a picture that “Meshulam and his followers amassed a cache of weapons”- as though they were storing weapons for a future shoot-out. The truth is there were only six weapons belonging to the soldiers who were his students. They lived on the other side of the Green Line and were licensed to carry their weapons. That was never disputed.
The bottom line is the Yalde Teman Affair. The government wanted the issue to go away and Rabbi Meshulam was very much in their way and the center of the issue. It was just that simple.
Rabbi Uzi Meshulam died in June 2013, a sick and broken man at home, not able to greet visitors, no less teach his students. I have scores of media articles from the Jerusalem Post, Reuters, A.P., U.P.I., Maariv and Yediot Achronot, writing such outlandish undocumented and unverified reports every day, that the Israeli public just did not have a true picture of him. I refuse to quote them and give their lies any more exposure.
A YEMENITE RALLY AT THE KOTEL
On February 19, 1996, over a thousand Yemenites who claim their babies were kidnapped, finally banded together and decided to hold a peaceful rally at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. They had acquired proper permits. They constructed an appropriate stage and sound system. There was music and as Yemenites do, there was also traditional dancing. The two invited speakers were Rabbi Shlomo Korach, Chief Rabbi of Bnei Brak and myself, representing YJFA. To our surprise, there were also over 200 police scrutinizing our rally.
Towards the end of my speech which was about the historical Yemenite contributions of culture to Israel since 1880 (the draining of the swamps in the Hula valley, dying of malaria for their efforts, and the planting of millions of trees in the Galilee) I was taken aback because the chief of police came up to the microphone and said that if I speak further, he would close down the microphone. The only democratic country in the Middle East did not like what I was saying. At that moment pandemonium broke out. People were screaming: “Let him speak.” I did not want to give the police an excuse to close down the rally as we had another hour on the permit. So I quieted down the audience and sat down. I found out the next morning that the police had no legal right to stop me from speaking even though I am not an Israeli citizen. However, I looked at the rally as a success, because it brought all these Yemenites together in unanimity.
INTERVIEWS WITH MOTHERS
In the next pages of my Memoir, I document just a few of the dozens of interviews I had with mothers who were told that their babies died in 1949. Years later, within the records of the Ministry of Interior, I found that they were adopted without the parents’ permission and were taken out of the country in 1962 and 1963. Because so many of the mothers told me the same story I can only deduce that there was an official policy of kidnapping of Yemenite and Mizrahi babies. Many Ashkenazi families were also in the same Mabarot, but their children were not taken. Also many hundreds of Ashkenazi orphans in 1948, came to Israel from displaced persons camps in Europe after the Holocaust. Foreign women came to Israel to adopt these orphans, but the Israeli government would not let them leave the country: as “these Ashkenazi orphans are the future of the country.” But a year later during the Yemenite Aliyah starting in 1949, over a thousand Yemenite babies disappeared.
When the uproar of Yalde Teman was at its height, the government made a feeble attempt at a cover-up. They hired Arabs from Gaza to dig rows of trenches in the Segula Cemetery in Petah Tikva. The trenches were more than 120 feet long, were covered over with cement and then markers were placed with the names of “dead” children. This was an attempt by the government to show grave plots. Some of the “graves” were exhumed and to no one’s surprise, were found empty. I took photographs and documented it in my book.
Now you have to ask yourself – does the Israeli government still think that the second and third generation of Yemenites still live in the 12th century? The dastardly nerve of those responsible for the continued cover-up of their earlier crimes is beyond human decency. The lack of respect towards Yemenites is totally unwarranted. Can they not feel our pain? Must parents spend the rest of their lives with the thought that their kidnapped children will spend the rest of their lives thinking they were abandoned?
Mrs. Mahatzri told me that she still carries her son’s baby cap and walks the streets of Tel Aviv looking for him daily. Mrs. Siri said she sits in the Tel Aviv bus station, still looking for her child. The Israeli government is without a clue as to how many lives they have ruined.
THE INVESTIGATOR FOR THE COHEN COMMITTEE
Yosseph Yossiphov, the sole lawyer investigator called me in February 1996. The Committee requested my assistance in helping them find kidnapped babies in the U.S. He said the committee had some information to that effect.
There is reason to believe according to the Cohen Committee that a Rabbi Bernard Bergman of New York had allegedly brought many babies to the U.S. However in order to do so, passports must have been issued. So logic then tells you that besides nurses, doctors, drivers, and the Jewish Agency, the Immigration Department was also involved. Otherwise, how did the children leave the country?
Yossiphov also asked if I could set up a meeting with the New York City Prosecutor Charles Hynes, who had prosecuted Rabbi Bernard Bergman. This powerful and wealthy Rabbi in New York was indicted and sent to prison for stealing a huge amount of money from elderly people in the nursing homes he operated. He was also known to be the middle-man, according to an article published by the journalist Uri Avneri. On January 11, 1967, under the title: “The Earthshaking Discovery of the Year. The children of Yemenite immigrants were sold to America - $5000 per child.”
By this time Bergman had died in jail and Charles Hynes was now the District Attorney of Brooklyn. The hope was that when Bergman’s phones were tapped, he may have mentioned Yalde Teman. Through my friend Jack Chartier, the N.Y. State Deputy Comptroller, I was able to set up an appointment for Yosseph Yossiphov and Charles Hynes. Mr. Hynes said he would also invite all the investigators of Bergman to the meeting.
Yossiphov and his wife arrived in New York one week before the meeting and stayed at his cousin’s home in New York.
I invited them to dinner at my home the evening before the scheduled meeting. Included were very close friends from Forest Hills, who were distantly related to Yossiphov. During the meal that my wife Jackie prepared, Yossiphov matter of factly announced that he had changed his mind and would not attend the meeting. We were all in a state of shock. I explained the importance of having Charles Hynes’ cooperation and the unprecedented gathering of all the involved investigators. This would have been the Israelis’ first opportunity to investigate in the United States. He would not give me a reason. He said it was a “secret.” I asked him if he realized the embarrassing position he was putting me in! The chutzpa of his attitude! My first impulse was to throw him out of my home. My friend who is a psychiatrist somehow calmed down the situation. Yossiphov went upstate for another week’s vacation. My feeling was that his pork barrel ‘vacation’ to the United States was at the committee’s expense.
Six months later Yossiphov called again, asking for another meeting. With my head between my legs, I asked Charles Hynes for another meeting. He agreed, but with the stipulation that he could not invite the other investigators again. I stuck my neck out this time because of the importance of this meeting and what it could produce. We could finally find out the extent to Bergman’s involvement and possibly lead us to others in New York who may have helped him. True to his character, Yossiphov called from Israel a week before the appointment and said he would not make it again and would I reschedule it. I told him very politely what I thought of his poor work ethic and my disgust with the Yehuda Cohen Committee. I gave him Hynes’ phone number and suggested that he make his own appointments. To my knowledge no one on the committee has met with the District Attorney. We lost another opportunity.
CHABAD TELEVISION – “A CABLE TO JEWISH LIFE”
There are fifty-three American Jewish Organizations, all under the umbrella of the “Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.” I personally appealed to most of them for help in putting pressure on the Israeli government to create a DNA blood bank so that we could have a data- base of the parents, in the hope that we could match kidnapped children with their biological parents. In some cases they were in tears when I described Yalde Teman. However they all saw this as criticism of Israel, which they could not or would not do. The only ones who agreed to help were the American Sephardi Federation and Chabad. The American Sephardi Federation invited me to their convention in Miami Florida, to give a workshop on Yalde Teman. It had such appeal that it ended up in standing room only. They adopted a resolution supporting my efforts.
Chabad invited me to make an appeal on their T.V. program. On February 8, 1996 I made my first of three television appearances on “A Cable to Jewish Life,” hosted by the very personable Rabbi Yosef Katzman. The Chabad are lovers of Israel, but they also had the courage to give me a platform. And that is how I discovered Tzila Levine.
THE TZILA LEVINE STORY
With documents in hand and having all the information at my fingertips, I told the story of Yalde Teman and put my office phone number on the screen. Chabad are great believers in miracles and this story in many ways was a miracle. This cable program was aired at 9:30 a.m. Sunday morning in N.Y. It was broadcast throughout the United States, South America and parts of the Pacific.
Tzila Levine, a 49 year old secular woman living in Sacramento CA could not sleep on that Sunday morning. So she put on the T.V. Out of 200 cable stations that she had access to, she turned to “A Cable to Jewish Life,” which airs at 6:30 a.m. where she lives. She watched me speak and knew she was one of the children I was talking about. The next day she called me believing she was one of the kidnapped children.
She sent me her identification number and adoption papers which were later deduced to be a forgery. She included a letter stating that her adoptive mother told her she was obtained from the private home of a pediatrician in Haifa where there were many other babies to be adopted. The pediatrician and his wife both worked in Rambam Hospital in Haifa. I sent all these documents to the Committee in Jerusalem in March of 1996. Every week Tzila called me to hear of news from the Committee.
The question remains: Why were babies housed in the private home of a pediatrician who, along with his wife (a nurse), was taking babies from Rambam Hospital in Haifa? If the babies were sick, why were they not in the hospital?
If the babies were well, why where they not returned to the children’s home in the Maabara and to their parents? Tzila’s mother said there were many babies to choose from!
MY COMMITTEE APPEARANCE
After five months of waiting, I appeared before the Committee asking why they had not acted on Tzila’s case, as she was the only person in the United States who came forward with documentation. Tzila had a great need to know who she was, why she was kidnapped and why she was illegally put up for adoption. The 83-year-old Chairman Yehuda Cohen, a former Chief Justice said: Mr. Giat, you did not come to Israel to advise this committee how to operate?
Our mandate is only to find out what happened and how it happened.” He then complained that not enough Yemenites were coming forward. I suggested to the Committee that after ten years of continued Government investigations with no results, the Yemenite community felt the committee was purposely not subpoenaing those responsible, to get at the truth. I said “If the Committee, with their great powers and more than adequate funding, would single out Tzila as a priority case and find her biological parents, more Yemenites would come forward.” They refused!!
I told them I would then have to do it myself, without their powers and funding, as I felt responsible for her.
GETTING RESULTS
I then interviewed attorneys in Israel who could represent us pro-bono before the Supreme Court, as our Federation did not have funds for an investigation. I chose Rami Tsuberi a Yemenite from Petah Tikva. Tzila and I gave him power of attorney.
We published her photos in Israeli newspapers. The family of Margalit Omessi from Amidar outside of Bnei Brak, had a suspicion that Tzila could be from their family. After Tzila was interviewed on Israeli television, the Omessi family was convinced. They called the TV station to say they would come to see Tzila in person. The resemblance between the sisters was striking. I recommended caution until a DNA test could be done. As it was, Dr. Hassan Khatib the Director of the Department of Genetics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, heard the story on TV. For humanitarian reasons, he offered to do the DNA tests for free. On August 25th, after taking blood samples from Tzila, Mrs. Omessi, her son and two daughters, the DNA showed 99.99143% that Tzila Levine was in fact Margalit Omessi’s daughter. I am proud to say that at least this family was finally reunited after 49 years.
What more proof does the world need that there was a systematic program under the responsibility of the government, which kidnapped Yemenite babies and were given or sold to Ashkenazi Holocaust Survivors through illegal adoptions, all without parents’ permission?
When one realizes the enormity of this operation, it is obvious that it had to have been officially organized and coordinated. I cannot prove who the perpetrators were, because the Ministry of Interior and the government are protecting them through sham investigations and permanently locked files.
Is it any wonder why over a thousand Yemenite families feel that their redemption to Zion was a falsehood? The cover-up of the Israeli government protecting the criminals responsible for destroying Yemenite families will forever be a cancer that will destroy any gratitude Yemenites have for their immigration. As long as the cover up continues, never can Israel be a ‘Light Unto the Nations.’
I have collected over one hundred pounds of evidence, hours of video tapes, and documents about Yalde Teman. I donated all of these for safekeeping to the Jerusalem repository of the Ben Zvi Institute for Middle East Studies. It is now open to all scholars for further examination.
Excerpt from the author’s My Memoir as an Activist for Yemenite Jews and Israel, 2010, copyright Sampson Giat, all rights reserved, re-posted to SHU 609, November 27, 2013
Yemenite Babies who Disappeared in 1950s Israel were Sold to U.S. Jews, New Film Claims
By: Judy Maltz
In 1994, a few dozen armed Yemenite Jews barricaded themselves in a home in the central Israel city of Yehud. They would not leave, they warned, until an official investigation was launched into allegations that Yemenite children had been systematically abducted and handed over to Ashkenazi families – sometimes in exchange for money – in the early years of the state. Their leader was a radical rabbi named Uzi Meshulam, who threatened bloodshed. The standoff lasted seven weeks, and Meshulam ended up serving nearly six years in prison.
But by drawing public attention to their cause, he and his followers were able to force the government’s hand. A year after the standoff, a commission of inquiry was established to determine the fate of hundreds of Yemenite babies and toddlers who had gone missing in the 1950s, not long after they and their families arrived in the recently established state. Did they die of illness, as two previous investigations had found, or had they been abducted and handed over to childless couples in Israel and the United States in exchange for money, as Meshulam and his followers insisted?
A new documentary recently aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV suggests Meshulam may not have been as crazy as many in Israel believed. Relying on fresh testimonies, rare footage of the commission hearings and recently declassified documents, “Lost Children” presents considerable evidence to support his claims.
“I was also one of those people who thought these were wacko claims and that Uzi Meshulam and his followers were all wackos,” says Prof. Meira Weiss, an Israeli anthropologist interviewed in the hour-long documentary.
Years later, intrigued by new evidence that had emerged to support the abduction theory, Weiss proceeded on her own quest to discover the truth. On a trip to New Jersey, where she had heard that several of the missing Yemenite children ended up, she says her suspicions were confirmed.
“What I was told is that these families had heard through the Jewish community that they could adopt orphans in Israel in exchange for money that would be used to help the new Jewish state get on its feet and purchase weapons,” she says in the film. “So they came and took these children they believed were orphans. As they saw it, they were doing a mitzvah and were very proud of that. When they heard later on that there might be parents who were still alive and that the money they gave didn’t all go to buy weapons, they were genuinely shocked.”
Weiss says her investigation led her to believe that the stories she had heard about children being handed over for adoption without their parents’ consent were not isolated cases. “It was a phenomenon,” she says.
Last December, the Israel State Archives released more than 200,000 previously classified documents pertaining to this decades-long affair that has come to symbolize the grievances of Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin) against the establishment. They include testimonies of parents who searched in vain for their missing children and their graves for decades; of hospital nurses who witnessed children being given away without permission; and of children sent off for adoption who later tried to reconnect with their biological parents. However, the documents provided no outright proof of an organized and institutionalized abduction campaign.
The newly declassified papers also include minutes from the hearings of the commission of inquiry established in 1995. Like the two previous commissions that investigated the affair (the most recent being by Justice Moshe Shalgi in 1988), this one also found that most of the Yemenite children who disappeared had died of illness. While the fate of several dozen children is still unknown, the most recent commission of inquiry determined that none of the children had been kidnapped.
The new documentary challenges these findings. A key testimony is provided by Ami Hovav, who worked as an investigator on two of the three commissions of inquiry. In an interview with Rina Matzliach, the Channel 2 correspondent who made the film, Hovav addresses the role of machers, or middlemen, in the disappearance of several children. As part of his duties on the commissions, Hovav had been asked to investigate reports, published as early as 1967, that Yemenite children had been abducted and sold to wealthy Jews abroad for $5,000 a head.
Interviewed in the film, Hovav relays that many of the Yemenite babies and toddlers were put in child-care centers run by the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), one of the largest Jewish women’s organizations in the world.
“There was a rule at the time that if the parents didn’t show up within three months to reclaim their children, the kids would be sent off for adoption,” he states. “So there were these machers who would come and get $5,000 for each child that was adopted.”
But it would be wrong, he says, to describe such transactions as sales: “This was a commission they took, just like real estate agents. This was their job.”
The film provides never-before-seen footage, shot by Meshulam’s followers, of the 1995 commission of inquiry hearings. At one point, Sonia Milstein, the head nurse at the Kibbutz Ein Shemer absorption center, recounts how Yemenite children were systematically separated from their parents and put in childcare centers. When asked to explain why no records of their whereabouts were ever kept, she responds: “That was the reality then. It was what it was.”
In more rare footage, a former doctor at a WIZO center in Safed tells her interrogators at the commission hearings she has no recollection of what happened to the Yemenite children housed at her facility. Commenting in the documentary, Drora Nachmani – the lawyer who interrogated the doctor and other witnesses – notes that this sudden loss of memory among WIZO staff members was not uncommon.
“Some of the WIZO witnesses didn’t want to come to the hearings, and we would have to chase after them,” she tells Matzliach. “Often, they would insist we come to them rather than they come to us, as if they were afraid of something. And sometimes they said one thing to one investigator and something else to another.”
According to Nachmani, the WIZO day-care centers “were often the last stop or the second-last stop in the whole chronology of events” surrounding the disappearance of the Yemenite children.
“They were a central junction in this whole story,” she states.
The documents recently declassified by the Israel State Archives were meant to stay under wraps for another 15 years. But in response to public pressure, the government decided to release them sooner.
Mizrahi activists had been urging the government to open the state archives for several years, arguing that the various commissions of inquiry whitewashed the affair. A driving force behind the campaign has been an organization called Amram.
Interviewed in the film, founding member Shlomi Hatuka notes that out of more than 5,800 Yemenite babies and toddlers known to have been alive during the first years of the state, 700 disappeared. “That is one out of eight children,” he tells Matzliach. “And if you take into account those parents who didn’t report their missing children, it’s probably closer to one out of seven, or one out of six.”
The irony, he notes, is that families were told their children were being moved from absorption centers to child-care centers for reasons of health and sanitation, but many became ill there, ending up in hospitals from which they never returned.
To illustrate the atmosphere of mayhem in those early days of the state, Hovav recounts a story he heard from Milstein, the head nurse, about what would happen when sick babies were taken to the hospital. “An ambulance driver would pick them up and the babies would be put in cardboard boxes that had been used to transport fruit, bananas or apples,” he relays. “And there would be five or six of these boxes in the back.”
Each carton, according to his account, had a little note attached to it bearing the child’s name, address and destination. “When it would get very hot,” he recounts, “the ambulance driver would open the window and a huge blast of wind would come in. What would happen then is that all those little notes would start flying in the air. They would stop the ambulance on the side of the road, but they had no idea after that which note belonged where.”
Asked to comment on the allegations raised against WIZO in the film, a spokeswoman issued the following statement: “The process by which children were admitted or left our facilities was handled exclusively by the certified state authorities, while WIZO’s role was restricted to caring for their health and welfare. The allegation that the organization played a central role in transferring the children to adoptive families is erroneous and is merely someone’s personal interpretation of events. The same is true about allegations raised by some of the interviewees in Rina Matzliach’s film.”
WIZO’s spokeswoman said her organization knew of no pressure put to bear on former staffers to refrain from cooperating with the commission of inquiry. “The reverse is true. WIZO handed over all the information it had, and the commission of inquiry not only found nothing wrong with the way it behaved, but recently the government even decided to publish this information on the internet.
“As a social organization,” she added, “WIZO supports all efforts to shed light on this affair, which has caused such great pain to many in Israeli society.”
From Haaretz, May 7, 2017, re-posted to SHU 792, May 31, 2017