Israeli government to compensate families of missing Yemenite children
Seventy years after, the Israeli government expresses regret over the disappeared Yemenite children and is offering the families reparations.
The long saga surrounding the disappearance of over a thousand immigrant children from Yemenite Jewish families took an important turn this week. After almost seven decades, the government finally recognized the suffering of their families and decided Feb. 22 to compensate them each for their loss.
The plan approved by the government sets aside a sum of 162 million shekels ($50 million), which would be distributed to families based on the following criteria: 150,000 shekels ($46,000) is to be given to each family who received no information about the death of their child in real time, including the circumstances of the child’s death or an as yet unidentified place of burial (also including the families of children whose burial places were only identified significantly later than the death of the child). In the event that the committee responsible for the investigation concludes that the fate of the missing child is still unknown, the family is to receive 200,000 shekels ($61,000).
Furthermore, the government announced that the state will officially recognize that these children were taken away from their parents. The official statement said the government expresses its "regret over the events that occurred in the early days of the state and recognizes the suffering of the families whose children were part of this painful affair." On the other hand, the government rejected the families’ demand that what happened was part of an institutional attack against the families of the abducted children, or that it exploited parents who were new immigrants from an undevelopped state.
It came as no surprise that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for this decision now, just one month before the upcoming election. Inevitably, it will serve his interests. He not only congratulated the government for making this decision, but promised he would ask the education minister to include the story of these children in state-sanctioned textbooks. As he put it, “People need to know about what happened.”
