True Story from the 5,000 Stolen Yemeni Jewish Babies
Published By Petal on 2011-08-10 139 Views

Here are some true stories told by the mothers of Jewish Yemeni babies which were taken from them on their arrival in Israel. Between 1948 and 1952 approximately 5,000 Yemeni babies were taken from their parents and never seen again.
While spending time with some elderly Yemeni Jews I heard many interesting and heart breaking stories about the history and personal experiences of the Yemeni Jews.
 

This occurred while the new Yemeni immigrants, just arrived in Israel where staying in temporary camps set up by the Zionist Jewish Agency. In these camps parents were accommodated separately to the children who were kept together in a children's tent. The Yemeni mothers would arrive at teh children's tent to be told that the child had died in the night or that they had never existed. The children were later discovered to have been adopted by well off sophisticated and educated European Jews who had no children of their own, could not have children or had perhaps lost them in the Holocaust.

Here is one of those stories "from the horse's mouth" as it were:
The lady I met is called Sarah, she married in Yemen when she was 12 and together with her husband immigrated to Israel. While in one of the immigration camps her first born son of 14 months was taken from the children's tent, and she was told that he had died during the night. They were shown no body, no grave and no documentation.

Sarah went on to have 6 more children, and live in Tel Aviv. Many years later Sarah, now 60, took a bus from her neighborhood into the center of Tel Aviv. As she boarded the bus her heart stopped and she thought she had seen a ghost. She was absolutely positive that the bus driver was her long lost son.
 

Sarah told the driver that there was an emergency and that he had to come with her to the police station. After much discussion and without giving an explanation Sarah persuaded the driver to leave his bus there and then and accompany her to the police station.
 

The bus driver arrived at the police station with Sarah, still unsure of her intentions. She asked him to wait a minute while she took a policeman aside and told him that she was sure that this man was her son, and that she could prove it. The son she lost had a distinct birthmark on his thigh.
The officer took the bus driver into an interrogation room and began to question him. What is your name? Where did you grow up? Who are your parents? How old are you? What is your date of birth? Where you adopted? The bus driver answered that his parents had passed away a long time ago and that he was not adopted.
 

The officer managed to avoid explaining to the driver why he was being questioned, until the officer asked if the driver had any birthmarks. At this point the driver insisted on knowing what he was being questioned for, and the police officer told him that this lady thought he could be her son. It turned out that the driver did have the very same birthmark described by Sarah, and after further biological tests was proved to be her son.

Sarah told me that today they are in touch and they have a good relationship. His adoptive parents were not guilty of any crime as they had also been tricked and told that the child was an orphan. What a burden to be lifted off of a mother's heart after so many years.
Of course the tragedy of all this, apart from the heartache, and criminal behavior, is that Jewish couples might meet and marry without knowing that they are related.