Shlomi Bahagli was buried Oct. 18 in Rosh Ha’ayin, having reached the age of 92. For more than 60 years he never stopped searching for his son Hayim, who disappeared as a baby. Bahagli died without knowing whether his son had been taken from him and given to another family, with the knowledge and involvement of the State of Israel. He was told that the baby died of illness at the hospital. There are many other families in Israel like his, mostly of Yemenite origins, who claim that their children were taken from them shortly after they immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s and given to Ashkenazi families for adoption.
The sadness that enveloped Bahagli’s family and friends at his death was compounded by an overwhelming sense of missed opportunity, because the day he died, he was scheduled to take a DNA test that could have shed light on the fate of his son.