Stories of The Stolen Jewish Yemeni Children
by Here is a true story told by a Jewish Yemeni woman whose baby was taken from her in 1951, while staying in a Zionist Jewish Agency temporary camp in Israel, and how she was reunited with her grown son by chance years later.
While spending time with some elderly Yemeni Jews I heard many interesting and heart breaking stories about the history and personal experiences of the Yemeni Jews.
As I wrote in my first article on this subject, between 1948 – 1952 5,000 Yemeni babies were taken from their parents and never seen again This occurred while the new immigrants, just arrived in Israel, where staying in temporary camps set up by the Zionist Jewish Agency.
The children were later discovered to have been adopted by well off sophisticated and educated European Jews who had no children of their own; could not have children or had perhaps lost them in the Holocaust. Here is one of those stories “from the horse’s mouth” as it were:
The lady I met is called Sarah, and when she was 12 she married in Yemen, and together with her husband she immigrated to Israel. While in one of the immigration camps her first born son of 14 months was taken from the children’s tent and she was told that he had died during the night. They were shown no body, no grave and no documentation.
Sarah went on to have 6 more children, and lived in Tel Aviv. Many years later Sarah now in her 70’s took a bus from her neighborhood into the center of Tel Aviv. As she boarded the bus her heart stopped and she thought she had seen a ghost. She was absolutely positive that the bus driver was her long lost son.
Sarah told the driver that there was an emergency and that he had to come with her to the police station. After much discussion and without giving an explanation Sarah persuaded the driver to leave his bus there and then and accompany her to the police station.
Still unsure of the woman’s intentions the bus driver arrived at the police station with Sarah, and she asked him to wait a minute while she took a policeman aside and told him that she was sure that this man was her son, and that she could prove it. The son she lost had a distinct birthmark on his thigh.
The officer took the bus driver into an interrogation room and began to question him. What is your name? Where did you grow up? Who are your parents? How old are you? What is your date of birth? Where you adopted? The bus driver answered that his parents had passed away a long time ago and that he was not adopted.
The officer managed to avoid explaining to the driver why he was being questioned, until the officer asked if the driver had any birthmarks.
At this point the driver insisted on knowing what he was being questioned for, and the police officer told him that this lady thought he could be her son.
It turned out that the driver did have the very same birthmark described by Sarah, and after further biological tests he was proved to be her son.
Sarah told me that today they are in touch and they have a good relationship. His adoptive parents were not guilty of any crime as they had also been tricked and told that the child was an orphan. What a burden to be lifted off of a mother’s heart after so many years.
Of course the tragedy of all this, apart from the heartache, and criminal behavior, is that Jewish couples might meet and marry without knowing that they are related.
Image via Wikipedia
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Post CommentValerie Curtiss
On October 18, 2009 at 3:57 pm
What a heart warming story for a heartbroken mother. What man will to do a fellow man is so horrendous. Makes one wonder, at least the animals only kill for food to sustain either them or their children, only man seems to want to do insidious acts to their fellow men. Great writing.
AthenaNY
On November 29, 2011 at 9:44 pm
I read another article where they say that the kidnapped Yemenite children were used in atomic testing.Why would they take the children and adopt them out to others? What did they really have to gain?!
Petalm
On November 30, 2011 at 2:37 am
The motivation for taking the children was that you had Jews coming from war torn Europe who had lost their families in the Holocaust, these Jews, the Ashkinazi or “whites” were more powerful in Israel at the time and the “darker skinned” Jews from the East were less educated and less worldly wise so they could be easily lied to. So the beautiful Yemani kids were given to Ashkinazi families which had lost their kids int he Holocaust or never had the oppotunity to have kids because of the war.
Racism in Israel is interesting, the fact that they are all Jews unites them but the sub-text is that Eastern Jews and Western Jews are very different.
I’ve never heard of the kids being used for experiments but teh fact that they were taken is definate.