Several hundred people who gathered in Rosh HaAyin on Oct. 8 raptly focused on the huge screen at the front of the hall. They were watching the disconcerting testimony of Shulamit Mallik, 83, and the spine-tingling validation it gave to their similar claims that an official state apparatus was involved in kidnapping the children of Yemenite immigrants in the 1950s and handing them over for adoption.

When Mallik was 18, she worked at the children's home at the Kadima transit camp for immigrants arriving in Israel. She said that delegations of women from overseas sometimes came to visit the camp and that a number of babies then would disappear from the camp immediately afterward. She recalled suspecting that something inappropriate was taking place and the screams of mothers when they were informed that their children had allegedly died of illness. Many members of the audience — the brothers and sisters of those infants — could not hold back the tears. Their parents were likely dead or too old to attend the event, but these siblings, now in their 60s and 70s, came to exchange stories. The similarities in their accounts were chilling.

Yedioth Aharonoth first reported on Mallik's story in August. This month, she sat facing a hall full of people with similar experiences at the annual Yemenite Festival, hosted by the city of Rosh HaAyin every Sukkot. Her remarks had special meaning to them. They were poignant coming directly from her. Watching select parts of Mallik's video testimony intensified the outpouring of emotion. For six decades, they had been silenced or branded as delusional, but now they felt that the truth was finally coming to light, and that it would no longer be possible to dismiss their account of what happened. More documents and testimonies came to light last year, proving that parents had not concocted horrific stories about the abduction of their children. In some way, it was a relief for many, after years of dealing with a wound that refuses to heal. The establishment was finally paying attention to their anguished cries.

Last year was a milestone in the long-running saga of the kidnapped Yemenite babies, which has dogged Israeli society since the 1950s. Over the past few decades, a number of committees charged with investigating the affair only scratched the surface, doing nothing to uncover the scope of the affair. This year was the first time that the government has recognized the injustice suffered by these families, establishing the Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, the East and the Balkans to investigate the affair.