Yemeni Jewish Babies Disappeared: A True Story

I’ve spent the last week helping a family of Israeli Yemeni Jews sit “Shiva”, the seven days of mourning following a death. While I was in and out serving coffee I heard the most incredible stories from the people who came to give their condolences. Let me share one with you:

Two old Yemeni ladies waddled in and eased into the plastic chairs, before reminiscing about the elderly gent that had just passed away. As happens often the conversation quickly became one of explaining where they fitted into the family tree of intermarried clans and who was the brother of the second wife of the third child of whom.

In the end I asked Naomi, one of these smooth brown skinned grannies how many children she had. She replied 5, but one was taken, her first born. I enquired what she meant, had he died?

No, it turned out that having married at 13 to her 17 year old groom in Yemen and then immigrating to Israel around 1950, they were placed, along with many other Jews from Arab Nations, in camps. These camps had bad facilities, no heating and little food, but they were in the Holy Land, and thankful for that.

They arrived with their first born son who was then 2 years old, and were housed in one of the camp’s tents. The Yemeni immigrants were naïve and believed that the Zionist Jewish Agency which had brought them to Israel had only their best interests at heart.

On one particular evening when it was bitterly cold, one of the camp organizers came around and told Naomi, that she should take the child to the children’s quarters where he would get medical attention, more blankets and bigger food rations, otherwise the child could die of cold. Fearing that her child’s life was in danger, wanting only the best for him and having complete naïve trust in her fellow Jew, Naomi handed over her child.

The next morning when she tried to visit him she was told that he had died during the night. Distraught with the loss of this healthy first born son, her and her husband began to demand an explanation. No body was produced, they said it had already been buried and no documentation or details of the death were given. The child had simply disappeared.

Now if this had happened once or twice it probably could be believed, and gone unnoticed by the media, but between 1948 and 1952 approximately 5,000 Jewish Yemeni babies disappeared. The Yemeni community have found ample proof that the babies were given to richer more sophisticated Ashkenazi Jews who arrived from war torn Europe.

Since the 50’s many children have been reunited with their parents, either by accident or through agencies. Having spoken to Naomi myself, I look at 2 year old children and imagine them simply disappearing, and the heart wrenching  trauma that Naomi must have experienced is unimaginable. I have written another article about stories I heard at the Shiva, and one of a woman who found her baby many years later by chance.

Image by werkunz1 via Flickr