Yemenite Children Affair: In first, boy’s grave opened for DNA testing

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For the first time, the grave of a boy was opened for genetic testing Monday in accordance with a 2018 law relating to the “Yemenite children affair” – the disappearance of Yemenite babies and toddlers in the 1950s. Families believe their children were abducted by the state in order to adopt them out to Israeli families of European descent.

The boy, Uziel Khoury, was a year old when he was reported to have died during treatment for polio in 1953. In one of the associated documents, the family was quoted as saying that they didn’t see the body being buried – that instead a “small package” was taken and buried.

Judge Moshe Shalgi, who headed a committee to investigate the Yemenite children affair, signed a document that read, “There is clear data to determine that the missing person died and was brought for burial.”

Khoury’s sister, Mazal Barko, in an interview with Reshet Bet radio, said Monday morning that the family has been in a court battle for the past four years over the opening of the grave.

“It’s been 69 years since he disappeared from us,” she said. “We are asking the government for nothing more than the truth.”

In the years immediately following Israel’s establishment, primarily from 1948 to 1954, more than 1,000 babies born to Yemenite immigrant families disappeared. According to a large number of accounts, the children disappeared either immediately after birth or after being hospitalized due to illness. Some of the families were told that their children had died but they were not shown a body, did not receive a death certificate, or information on a burial.

Eighteen years later, the families received draft notices for the children – prompting claims that the children had been abducted in a secret, organized, institutionalized plan to give them or to sell them to childless Holocaust survivors. The affair was investigated by three official committees – in the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s, the latter being a state commission of inquiry that finished its work in 2001.

All three panels came to similar conclusions: that most of the children died of illness and that there was no evidence of their institutionalized abduction. The state commission of inquiry found that 1,053 children, most of them babies, had disappeared; that the vast majority of them clearly had died of illnesses; that it was probable that 48 of them had died; and that the fate of 69 children was unknown.

In 2017, the State Archives made hundreds of thousands of relevant documents accessible to the public. Although they contained damning accounts of official conduct, they did not find evidence of an institutionalized plan to abduct children. Following the disclosure of the documents, the Knesset convened a special committee to investigate the affair.

The committee found widespread negligence, racist and remiss conduct on the part of officials, and carelessness in recording the details of hospitalized children, which in some cases led to their adoption without the knowledge or consent of the biological parents. However, they also found no proof of a state-led plan to abduct children.

In recent years, Yemenite families filed lawsuits demanding that graves be reopened to determine whether their children were buried there. Some families managed to find the plots where it was claimed that their children were buried, despite incomplete details provided by the government over the years in connection to the date of death, the name of the cemetery and the plot number. But the families encountered bureaucratic hurdles and other obstacles on the part of the government, which objected to the reopening of the graves for various reasons. Three years ago, the government approved a plan permitting the graves to be opened.