How did the Zionist regime (Israel) kidnap hundreds of Yemeni Jewish children?
During the years of the establishment of the Zionist regime, hundreds of Yemeni Jewish children were abducted by various Zionist parties, and the fate of many of them is still unknown after decades.
In 1946, one of the women of “Betah Takfa”, the first Zionist settlement built-in 1878 in occupied Palestine, who had emigrated from Germany, applied for adoption on the condition of being “Ashkenazi” or “white Yemeni” and “having artistic talent.
In another case, a Polish Jew and his Austrian wife only applied for the adoption of a healthy child, preferably a European … A Palestinian Jewish carpenter and his Greek wife apply for the adoption of a Spanish child … Later, in 1955, a Jewish nurse woman who had come from Austria to work in occupied Palestine at Tel Aviv Hospital applied for adoption, only if she was not an Eastern Jew, but her husband said. Which “accepts any proposal in this regard.
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, Yocheved, 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.
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 have 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.
When Leah Aharoni remembers losing her baby daughter five decades ago, she bursts into tears.
“I just saw her for a short time. She was pretty with fair skin. She opened her eyes and looked at me as if she was saying: ‘Don’t let me go,'” she says.
Leah had given birth to premature twins in a hospital near her home in Kiryat Ekron, in central Israel, but the little girls were sent away to be cared for.
She was told they were being taken to a special clinic in Tel Aviv. But when Leah’s husband visited soon afterward, only one of the twins was there. The other, Hanna, had died, he was informed.
Leah was shocked not to be shown a body or a grave – a common feature of such stories – but she and her husband did not doubt the heart-breaking news.
Two draft notices arrived in the post simultaneously. One for Hagit – and one for Hanna. This is another hallmark of missing baby stories.
“It started to bother me. Something was not right. I couldn’t sleep at night. I decided I had to know what happened,” Leah says.
Leah had experienced many calamities long before the loss of her baby. As a child, she and her family had joined thousands of Jews fleeing violence in Yemen. They were robbed as they trekked from one end of the country to the other and Leah was reduced to begging for food. Then they were rescued in an airlift known as Operation Magic Carpet.
“It was the land I had always dreamed about,” the 78-year-old recalls, remembering the flight to Israel.
“When we got off the plane everyone kissed the holy ground.
They had arrived, malnourished and penniless, during the first Arab-Israeli war.
Many Yemenite Jews spent periods in transit camps before being settled in homes, and stories of babies going missing began to arise immediately.
Some reports talk of children disappearing after visits to the camps by wealthy American Jews.
In other cases, children appeared to be recovering in hospitals from relatively minor ailments when the parents were suddenly told they had died.
On kibbutzes, where some of the Yemenites settled, it was typical for youngsters to be separated from their parents and looked after together, and here too it’s said that some children vanished.
