Will Israel finally take responsibility for kidnapped Yemeni babies?
Over the last year, the long-running affair of Israeli-Yemenite babies kidnapped and put up for adoption has risen on the public and political agendas.
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.
