Israeli Ministry Admits Selling Yemenite Children

The Israeli Health Ministry is stonewalling the publication of a draft report, which admits that Israel’s health system was involved in the disappearance of Yemenite and other children in the 1950s, robbing the children from their parents and arranging their illegal adoptions.

While the report presents no new testimonies, details or data, it is Israel’s first official ministerial reference to involvement in the scandal.

The report discusses how medical teams made decisions without parental consent or knowledge and admits to possible medical malpractice, noting that although there was no legislation or a code of ethics at the time regarding autopsies and research, the issue raises “ethical and social questions regarding the conduct of medical personnel.”

Obtained by Haaretz, the report admits to the involvement of doctors, nurses and caregivers in acting as middlemen in adoptions, sometimes in exchange for money. It chronicles their racist perceptions – how they thought they it was in the “best interests of the children” to rescue them from “backward immigrants.”

The report states that medical staff regarded immigrants as “the antithesis of hygienic human beings,” and filthy and unhygienic with no regard given to the highly unsanitary conditions in the transit camps. Mothers were reported as having “indifference” to their babies and fathers were also accused of neglect. The immigrants were seen as deficient in parenting skills due to their large families of up to 10 children at a time when the intelligentsia barely had two.

Included in the report is student caregiver Shoshana Shacham’s heartbreaking testimony of a transfer of children from the transit camp at Rosh Haayin:

“We saw cars arriving. People got out … and the nurses dealt with them. We saw these people putting the babies in their cars. So I asked, ‘Wait, where are they taking them?’ They replied: ‘We’re improving their situation … transferring them to families where they have a better chance of staying alive.’ We took this at face value. They said they were taking them to better homes, where they’d get better care and stay alive. That satisfied me. I said, ‘Great, they deserve it.’ But when the biological parents arrived, they were lied to, told that their children had died. We were witnesses to that.”

The draft’s authors recommended that the ministry “take action to promote an apology on behalf of the health system for the involvement of medical professionals in this affair,” and called on other government ministries to “strive to discover the truth” and establish their involvement in the matter.

The report was submitted to the Justice Ministry for review, since “it may raise questions related to compensation” which could “affect the state.” The government has already earmarked $52 million to compensate for the children’s disappearance.

{Matzav.com Israel}