Another Yemenite Children Affair:Playing God or crime against humanity?

Elyakhin, Israel July 20: The Yemenite Children Affair speaks the tale of disappearance of hundreds of babies and toddlers of new immigrants to state of Israel, mainly from Yemen, between the years 1948 to 1954. Shoshana Dugma , a Yemenite immigrant says she still clearly remembers the day 66 years ago ,when she went to feed her baby at the nursery at an immigrant camp in Israel and discovered that the toddler had vanished.

Early in the morning, she went to look for baby at the nursery couldn’t find her her 11-month-old daughter Mazal, the 83-year-old mother says, who at the time just arrived from Yemen.

Numerous stories of babies disappearing  from immigrant families in Israel for decades have been reported, but growing calls to unseal official documents on the allegations mean new light on the evidence could reveal.

Jewish Yemenite families allege that not only their offspring , but also from immigrants of other Arab or Balkan nations have been stolen  and given to Jewish families of Western origin in Israel and  abroad, mainly to people  who could not have children on their own.

After birth the hospital officials would be given a spoken explanation to parents their baby had died at childbirth , but would not hand over a body for burial.

Past official inquiries into the matter  found that most of the children whose cases were examined did indeed died due to poor health conditions and other complications at immigrant camps.

Repeatedly been the at the helm of public debate every few years,this subject has caught the attention of Israel’s elite.

The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Tzahi Hanegbi, appointed by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, will recommend that the government remove most of the confidentiality of the 1.5 million official documents relating to the missing children.

The debate campaign in this issue, led by  Nurit Koren (Likud), focuses that the material collected by the Kedmi Committee in the 1990s be published.

An earlier governmental order decreed that the committee’s minutes remain classified until 2071, a decision that can only be overturned by a government decision.

Koren, who is of Yemenite origin says that its a bleeding wound in the nation’s heart.

After Israel’s founding, the country set up camps to for the of immigrants from mainly Arab countries where 30,000 Jews arrived from Yemen around 1949.

In 1950, Dugma ,aged 17 said she was living in a tent in a camp in northern Israel with her husband and older children,where babies were kept in separate nurseries with better conditions.

Dugma said in an interview with AFP, speaking in Hebrew at her home in the Israeli town of Elyakhin, near the Mediterranean coast,that she put her baby to sleep at midnight .

The baby was neither sick or weak and was eating normally at that time.

By next morning the baby disappeared, she said, adding that there was no word on what happened since.

Following heavy pressure, Netanyahu published a video supporting the struggle of the families affected by this affair saying,

“The subject of the Yemenite children is an open wound that continues to bleed for many families who don’t know what happened to the infants, to the children who disappeared.

They’re seeking the truth and want to know what happened and I think it’s time to know and to achieve justice.

Another similar example is Barood Jibli’s seven-month-old baby girl Tziona was fine the last time she saw her in the nursery in 1950.

She was given a similar excuse of the baby having died when she was met by nurses in a hospital in Haifa, the 86-year-old said.

State committees formed to examine the claims were formed in 1967 because parents began receiving notices that their long-missing children were to report for mandatory military service.

The committee investigated the cases of 342 children, determining 316 of them had died.

A new committee was established in 1988, questioning the findings of the previous one followed by a commission of inquiry in 1995.

Findings published in 2001 said that of the 1,033 cases of babies that went missing in Israel that had been examined, 972 had died.

The fates of 56 were impossible to determine, while another five had been located.

The commission rejected claims of baby theft.claiming that there was no evidence for the claim of abductions, neither in its extreme form of the organized ‘abductions by the establishment’ nor in the more moderate form of ‘intentional baby stealing’.

It said the explanation for most cases was that parents were not properly informed of their babies’ deaths, with burials being conducted without them present.

The materials pertaining to the cases were classified for 70 years for privacy reasons.

Shlomi Hatuka, 38, is one of the activists founders of a group called Amram, seeking to document what he calls the “crime against humanity.”

Hatuka says that at 16, he was shocked to discover that his Yemenite grandmother had given birth to twins, one of whom was abducted .

Gil Grunbaum, 60, another among those who appear on Amram website, spent the first half of his life as the son of European Holocaust survivors, only to discover he was adopted.

He managed to track down his biological mother, a Tunisian immigrant, who told him she had been informed after giving birth that her baby child died at birth.

Grunbaum says that no one has the right to play God.