They thought they were dead but they had been kidnapped: the case of the missing children of Israel – 27/02/2019

By Malin Fezehai

ROSH HAAYIN, Israel – Ofra Mazor, 62, had been looking for his sister, Varda, for thirty years when, in 2017, he sent his DNA samples to the Israeli genealogical society MyHeritage.

His mother, Yochevet, who is already dead, said she could only badfeed Ophra 's sister once after giving birth in an Israeli hospital in 1950. The nurses told him that his newborn was dead. Mazor's mother did not believe the nurses and asked her husband to demand the baby's return. They never did it.

A few months after sending his DNA, Mazor received the call that he was waiting for: they had found a match. Last January, the sisters met. Varda Fuchs was adopted by a Jewish-German couple in Israel. They told her since she was small that she had been adopted. The sisters are part of a community of Israelis of Yemeni origin who for decades, they were looking for answers about their missing loved ones.

Removed and adopted

Known as the Cases of Jewish Yemeni children, more than a thousand official cases of missing babies and babies have been reported, but some estimates indicate that the number of defenders would reach 4,500. Their families believe that the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s and were placed in adoption. Ashkenazi families, Jews of European origin.

The the missing children were mostly Yemenis and other Mizrahi communities, a general term for Jews in North Africa and the Middle East. While the Israeli government is trying to be more transparent about the disappearances, it denies until now that there have been systematic kidnappings.

"I was sure she was Yemeni," said Fuchs, 68. "I was sorry." Mazor said finding his sister was like closing a cycle. "When we were kids, we both knew that something was missing," he said.

"It was a feeling of & # 39; Now you can go on behalf of our mother & # 39;. She knows that I found Varda. "

After the country was founded in 1948, new immigrants to Israel were placed in transit camps under terrible conditions. they were agglomerations of camps run by the state because of the lack of houses.

Hundreds of testimonies from families living in the camps were strangely similar: to women who gave birth in overcrowded hospitals or who took their children to the doctor. they were told that their children had died suddenly.

Testimonies from some families indicated that they had been asked to leave their children in crèches and that when their parents returned to pick them up, they were told that they had been taken to the school. hospital. they never saw them again. Families have never seen any bodies or graves. Many have never received death certificates.

The case comes to light

The problem drew the attention of the whole country in 1994 when Rabbi Uzi Meshulam and his army of worshipers barricaded themselves in a complex in Yehud town for 45 days and asked for an official investigation by the government to investigate the disappearance of Yemeni babies. One of Meshulam's followers was killed during a shootout with the police and the rabbi and his other supporters were sent to jail. At that time, almost all Israelis rejected Meshulam and the accusations as an insane theory of the plot of a religious radical.

The Meshulam partially achieved its goal the following year, when the Cohen-Kedmi Commission was created to examine more than a thousand cases of lost children. It was the third official research commission created by the Israeli government since the 1960s.

In 2001, the commission concluded that there was no evidence that the system was removing babies.. The results indicated that most of the children reported as deceased had died, but the location of about fifty children was not explained. The three commissions came to the same conclusions. Families and legal experts questioned the conduct and credibility of the committee.

Naama Katiee, 42, remembers hearing the news about Meshulam in adolescence. He asked his Yemeni father what had happened, but he told him that he did not want to talk about it. He met Shlomi Hatuka, 40, on Facebook through Mizrahi activist groups and together they founded AMRAM, a non-profit organization that: has listed more than eight hundred family testimonials on his website.

"I thought there was some kind of misunderstanding, I realized that it had really happened: the babies had been kidnapped ".

In the years following the founding of the country, Jews in Israel emigrated from more than 80 countries and several ethnic groups, as part of a national project focused on the search for a new identity. Israeli common. Yemeni and Mizrahi Jews tended to be poor, more religious and less educated than the Ashkenazi elite in Israel, who regarded them with contempt and wished that they conform to their idea of ​​a modern Israel.

Katiee also points out that during this period, Similar incidents have occurred in other parts of the world. In Australia, children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent have been forcibly separated from their families by the government. In the 1960s to the 1980s, the collection of the sixties was a practice in Canada that led to the removal of Aboriginal children from their communities and families, and to giving them to non-Aboriginal families in the country and the United States .

"It was a method to raise a new generation by separating and cutting the connection with its origins," said Katiee.

"Until the day of her death, my mother did not forget her baby.He always said: "They stole my son, they stole me" ".

For years, families have been told that they were wrong to blame the Israeli government for this kind of malice. Hatuka said that many mothers interviewed by AMRAM, including her own grandmother who lost a child, were often in conflict over who to blame. "They love this country," he said. "My grandmother knew that something was wrong, but at the same time I could not believe that a Jew could do something like that ".

These signs have been rejected for a long time by some Israeliswho attribute these deaths to high infant mortality rates and extreme conditions in the camps. They also cited a disorganized bureaucracy and poor records to explain the many anomalies that caused chaos among families in search of answers.

The issue continues to resurface due to sporadic cases of parents, who would have died in infancy, in which collect through DNA testingas well as testimonials from those who worked at the time as nurses who confirmed that the babies had been abducted. Due to unanswered questions, the government has tried in recent years to be more transparent.

Official recognition

In 2016, the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the previous three government commissions.or when he appointed a member of his cabinet, Tzachi Hanegbi, to review the evidence. Hanegbi told Israeli television: "They took the children away and distributed them to other people, I do not know where." He acknowledged that "Hundreds" of children were taken away without their parents' consent; the first time that a government official has said something like that in public.

"I saw children who looked like my children and I said," Maybe it's them? " "All the time, all my life, I've been looking for them."

Margalit Ronen, 92, was one of many people to have filed a complaint with the Cohen-Kedmi Commission. In 1949, Rohen came from Iran to Israel while she was eight months pregnant with her two twin daughters. After delivery, the hospital referred her and advised her to rest for a few days in the transit camp before bringing the girls home. When she called the hospital to tell them that she was going to pick up her babies, she remembered that the staff had informed her: "One is dead." in the morning and the other before noon, that should not come anymore. "

Gil Grunbaum, 62, learned that he had been adopted at age 38 when a family friend announced to his wife, Ilana, that he had been adopted. Grunbaum found her biological mother, an immigrant from Tunisia, who was told that her son died during her sedated delivery in 1956. Grunbaum's adoptive parents were Holocaust survivors in Poland. He did not want to add more trauma to their lives, so he kept the discovery to himself.

"Everything is still covered. And time is running out; our parents are dying. "

"We want to find the answer to this situation in the name of our mother, who has been overwhelmed by it all her life. My mother always asked about her baby. "

When Hagit, Leah Aharoni's daughter, was 17 years old, the army sent two recruiting documents: one for her and one for her twin sister, Hannah, who, according to their information, would have died after her birth. This led Aharoni to think that her daughter may still be alive.

He started looking for documents and found a document stating that two babies had been transported to Tel Aviv after learning that Hannah had died. In addition, he found a second death certificate dated three years after the announcement of the death of his daughter. Aharoni said that he then went to consult his father, a respected rabbi of the community, who had rejected his suspicions. "You are not allowed to think of Israel, they would not take a girl," He remembered what he said.

Many still have trouble accepting that such a situation can occur. "Jews doing these things to other Jews? I do not know," Yehudit Yosej, 91, said. Yosef took his son Rafael to hospital because of a fever in 1949. A few days later he received a call from a nurse who told him that his son had died. Fifty years later, Yosef received the death certificate of his son. "They told me:" We apologize for the delay. "

"They left us with a heart injury that has always lasted".

Noa Avishag Schnall contributed to this report.

© 2019 the New York Times