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The Jews Who Slipped Off the Magic Carpet
Felice Maranz
A charismatic, pistol-packing Yemenite leader has reopened the 40-year-old mystery of the `disappeared' immigrant children
The mystery of the missing Yemenite children has been circulating for years. But it's taken the unlikely persona of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam and a Waco, Texas-style armed cult standoff to force it back into the headlines.
Pudgy, pistol-packing Meshulam and some 40 militant followers, armed with automatic weapons, holed up in his home-synagogue complex in the town of Yehud, near Ben-Gurion Airport, in late March. Tension eased after some Knesset members promised the rabbi they would help him achieve his goals, but police kept the fortress under surveillance. On May 10 they arrested Meshulam and several of his followers and convinced the rest to surrender after an exchange of fire, in which one of the militants was killed.
Meshulam's main demand was for a commission of inquiry into the disappearance of Yemenite children in the early 1950s, which he blames on a massive kidnapping scheme perpetrated by the government. Most Israelis think the 42-year-old Meshulam who claims to have been wounded in the Yom Kippur War is crazy. But the charismatic rabbi's rhetoric touches an open 40-year-old wound among Israelis of Yemenite descent.
All parties concerned accept that some Yemenite children vanished during the chaotic early years of the State of Israel, when about 50,000 Jews were brought from Yemen in Operation Magic Carpet. A late 1960s government investigation concluded that four children had been illegally adopted, and another 22 could not be traced. Today, Dov Levitan, who has investigated
650 cases, says there are about 65 children he has been unable to account for. Meshulam insists that 4,000 disappeared.
Whatever the numbers, many Yemenite families tell a similar
story:Newly-arrived in Israel in the late 1940s or early 1950s, their
healthy infants were taken away for "medical treatment." Parents were not
allowed to see their children in hospital, but told they would see them
when they recovered. They never did. Instead, they were curtly told their
babies were dead. They received no death certificate and were never shown a grave.
The suspicion that the children were still alive blossomed in the mid-1960s, when draft notices calling the "dead" for military service started arriving
in their parents' mailboxes. Thousands of Yemenites parents and siblings and cousins believe their now-grown kin are alive and well, living with the Ashkenazi families which adopted them. Some believe that the infants were given to Holocaust survivors in Israel, to replace offspring lost in the Nazi death camps. Others say that the babies were sold to wealthy American Jews, to raise money for the fledgling state. Some are convinced the babies' corpses were used in research.
The passage of time, and the authorities' denials and explanations, have not allayed those suspicions. Death certificates have still not been
issued; forms from the income tax authorities or the Interior Ministry,
listing the missing children as living, still occasionally arrive in the
mail.
A series of slow-moving investigations, first launched in the 60s, have been rejected by the Yemenite parents as inadequate. The most recent, the Shalgi Commission, began work in 1988 and still hasn't published a single word.
Sa'adah Avivi pulls out a small, folded piece of paper. It's all she has left of her son, who vanished just after he was born, in 1951. The paper is a prescription to stop her breast milk; she no longer had a baby to feed. Tiny and kerchiefed, she sits in a comfortable living room at her son
Ya'acov's home in Kfar Ahim, a moshav south of Rehovot. It is a warm spring evening, and she is surrounded by her extended family.
"They took my son," Sa'adah says simply. "I gave birth to him at home, in the tent camp, and we were healthy. But the authorities said we had to be taken to the hospital. They didn't tell me anything, except that they would bring him later. That's it.
"I sat for 15 days in the hospital at Tzrifin (east of Tel Aviv). I would cry, and said I wouldn't go back without my baby. Then they gave me a shot, and for 10 years after that, I couldn't cry my heart was like a stone. I was embarrassed to go to funerals.
"Later I would complain to the doctor, and once he said, `Don't worry,
maybe he ended up somewhere good.' This always stayed with me."
What does she think happened to her son, and the other children? "They took them to people who didn't have children; they gave them to people from Germany." Her son Ya'acov holds a slightly different view. "There was a trade in children," he maintains. "People bought them. There was silence from the very top without their agreement, this wouldn't have happened. And we haven't forgotten." His brother Israel joins in: "It was like the Sicilian Mafia. The people in the Knesset told themselves, 'Those Yemenites have so many children, we can take one, and it won't matter.'"
Researchers and government investigators dismiss the conspiracy theories, and blame the mystery on the disorganization of the early years of the state. They have poured years into the search for the disappeared, and with a handful of exceptions have concluded unequivocally that the children did indeed die.
As a teenager in a yeshivah, Dutch-born Dov Levitan, now a lecturer and researcher in the social sciences at Bar-Ilan University, had a Yemenite friend. He became interested in Yemenite Jews, and has devoted his life to studying them. His first graduate work, on the disappeared children, was published in the late 70s. He's currently working on a book which will update his earlier research to include the current "Meshulam affair."
Levitan has researched 650 cases of children who "disappeared." "Ninety percent" of these children died, he confirms. "But it's likely that the other 10 percent are still alive, and we need to find them."
He explains the disappearances: "Many Yemenite children were extremely sick when they arrived in Israel, and were sent to hospitals. Some simply died, and the parents weren't always contacted." The belief that the children
were kidnapped has been intensified by the harsh treatment the immigrants
received as a whole, Levitan goes on. "Jewelry, clothes and holy books were stolen from them."
"The subject," he says, "blew up in 1966-68, when parents started to get army call-up notices. At the time, a government committee investigated the disappearance of 342 children. Four had been adopted, 316 had died, and the committee was unable to determine what happened to the other 22. I started my own research in the late 70s and decided the problem was bigger."
Even 20 years later, he says, the intensity of feeling among relatives is undiminished. "There's a deep scar here we need to close it. It's already a myth, and it will be very hard to get rid of it. We need to create a serious government committee but the government doesn't want to. They are afraid they will find out ugly things about aliyah
and they aren't interested." Ami Hovav, himself a Yemenite, has been interested in the issue for the past 30 years; a cousin of his disappeared. He's now working for the six-year-old Shalgi Commission; he can't talk about its ongoing work, but is willing to describe his past research, and says the Shalgi findings will probably be similar.
When Hovav left the army in the mid-60s, he opened a private detective agency. He eagerly accepted when he was asked to join the investigating
team of the first committee on the disappeared children.
"I had heard how children were stolen, kidnapped, and sold in the U.S. So I started to investigate. I gave it all my time. I went all over the country. I went to hospitals. I went to the hevrah kadisha, the burial societies. And I ever found a single case of an organized body kidnapping or stealing."
Hovav admits that in some cases, connections were lost between the children and their families, perhaps because of confusion over names: Yemenite names were long and many families had the same name. The names were unfamiliar to doctors and nurses, almost all Ashkenazim. And many children, weak and very sick from the long trek across the Yemeni desert, did die.
If a child died in the hospital, he continues, it was hard to find the family in the huge ma'abarah transit camps. "They would notify the office in the camps. The camps had maybe 20,000 immigrants. One clerk with a megaphone, riding a donkey, would ride around, announcing: `Sharabi family, your child died.' Perhaps eight Sharabi families would show up, but perhaps the Sharabis whose child it was simply hadn't heard. After a few days, the hevrah kadisha would bury the child.
"There were also children who came in like matchsticks, and then got healthy. The parents didn't recognize them, and wouldn't take them. They would be taken to orphanages, and be adopted legally. Today their parents say they were stolen."
But what about the draft notices? Wasn't that proof that the children were still alive? No, says Hovav. "The arrival of every child was recorded at the airport, when they came in, and at the Interior Ministry, and the
Defense Ministry. But if a child died," he says, "they never corrected the list at the Defense Ministry."
The evidence, he insists, indicates that there was no conspiracy. "If there had been, he asks, his voice rising, "where are the adults? There were cases where children disappeared. But did somebody intend to take them away from their arents? Never." Tell that to Na'amah Shilwan, with her warm eyes and curly hair. Her child, one of the very last cases, disappeared in
1955, when she was 16.
"I gave birth at home," she relates "and then took the baby to the hospital. He was born in the seventh month, but he was healthy." For 10 days, she says, the nurses refused to let her see the child. "Then they told me he was dead. We never got a death certificate, nor a burial. We never heard about him, nothing. He just disappeared."
She shrugs. "I had another son die afterwards, and I buried him." She raises her arms toward the ceiling. "God gives, and God takes away. But this one, he's always with me." Meshulam: Demanding a commission of inquiry Operation Magic Carpet: `Many Yemenite children were extremely sick when they arrived'
1994
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |