Yemenite Children Were Never Kidnapped in Israeli Hospitals

In the 1960s, several Yemenite immigrants to Israel began to suspect that their infant children—who had been reported dead shortly after their arrival in the country some fifteen years earlier—were indeed alive. Since the children had died in hospitals when the parents were not present, and the parents never saw the bodies, they thought it possible that Israeli officials had secretly put the babies up for adoption with more Western, Ashkenazi families. The ensuing scandal led to three separate formal investigations, with the first beginning in 1967 and the last concluding in 2001. Most of the children could be accounted for, and there was no evidence of unauthorized adoptions. More recently, the Israeli State Archives made public all the information available on the affair. Yaakov Lozowick, the archives’ director at the time, reveals what was discovered: