Israel “righted a historic wrong” on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed.
About sixty years after the so-called Yemenite Children Affair, Netanyahu debuted an online database containing around 400,000 documents Israel’s government possesses regarding these children, whose parents alleged they were kidnapped after being admitted to Israeli hospitals.
“For close to 60 years people did not know the fate of their children,” Netanyahu stated at the opening ceremony. “Today we are correcting an historic injustice of disregard or discrimination or concealing — we don’t know which — the fate of what have been dubbed as the ‘Yemenite children.'”
Over 1000 families, mostly immigrants, in the last 60 or so years claimed their children were stolen from Israeli hospitals and put up for adoption. Some received army draft papers or voter registration papers for children who had been either declared dead or disappeared.
Many of the kids died and were buried without their parents’ knowledge, but definitive details and records on the affair are hard to come by, according to the Times of Israel.
Some adopted children discovered through paternity tests that they were indeed from Yemenite families who were misinformed that they died.
“A brave and important act,” said Minister for Regional Cooperation Tzachi Hanegbi, whom Netanyahu charged with investigating the situation. Hanegbi’s cousin disappeared during the period in question.
“The government is now taking action for the first time. [This step] erases the feeling of an opaque and disconnected establishment.”
Hanegbi in November declassified the documents, which are from the years 1948 to 1954 and were dug up by threel investigative committees. The new database is part of the Israel State Archives.
Yigal Yossef, former mayor of Rosh Ha’ayin and a spokesman for the families, said his baby sister disappeared, and his family received her death certificate. “Two weeks ago I went to the Interior Ministry to check,” he continued, “and it turned out my sister is still alive.”
The address given by the Ministry was nowhere to be found, however. Yossef said he no longer knows whom to believe.
