Will mystery of Israel's missing Yemenite children soon be solved?

“I had a sister named Naomi Ziner who was hospitalized at Mt. Scopus. My father, of blessed memory, came to visit her and was told by the doctors that she had passed away. My father asked to see the body or receive a death certificate, but they ignored his requests with all sorts of excuses. He returned home without her. … I’m ashamed of a country where these were its founders on the one hand and its destroyers on the other hand. I scorn them.”

This testimony, by Nehemia Ziner, is only one of thousands gathered by the nongovernmental organization Amram in a giant archive uploaded to the internet last month. The website’s home page is full of photos, and clicking on one leads to the testimony of an Israeli family (most likely) of Yemeni origin who claims that one of its children was kidnapped by the Israeli establishment in the first years of Israel's existence, primarily between 1948 and 1954.

The affair of the Yemeni children is one of the most inflammatory in Israeli society. Since the 1960s, it has refused to disappear from the public's radar — every few years it comes up for debate, and new aspects of it are revealed. Some families claim that the Ashkenazi (European) establishment methodically and in a premeditated manner disappeared thousands of children of Yemeni background who had immigrated to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s and gave them to Ashkenazi families while telling their birth families that their child had died from illness.

In May 2016, Haaretz reprinted a series of investigative reports on the topic that it had first run in the 1990s. With the republication of the stories, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Minister Tzachi Hanegbi to look into releasing testimonies from the protocols of three commissions of inquiry into the matter that are classified until 2071.