Cabinet approves NIS 162 million settlement for families whose kids vanished after arriving in the country in 1950s; but no official apology for what happened.
By TOI STAFF
The government on Monday approved a NIS 162 million (almost $50 million) compensation plan for the families of immigrants to Israel during the state’s formative years who say their children and siblings were taken from them by the authorities when they arrived in the country in the 1950s and then disappeared.
Known as the Yemenite children affair, the issue involves over 1,000 families — mostly immigrants from Yemen, but also dozens from the Balkans, North Africa, and other Middle Eastern countries — who have alleged their children were kidnapped from Israeli hospitals and put up for adoption, sometimes abroad.
The official explanation is that the children died while under medical care, but many families do not believe this, insisting their children were taken away and given to childless couples of European backgrounds. Although previous inquiries have dismissed claims of mass abductions, the suspicions have lingered and contributed to a long-simmering fault line between Jews of European origin and those of Middle Eastern backgrounds.
Though the state Monday expressed regret and understanding of the suffering caused to the families, there was no official apology for what remains one of the most controversial and sensitive issues in Israeli society.
The absence of an official apology drew criticism from those who have assisted the affected families as they’ve sought answers to what happened to their children, as well as criticism because the terms of the plan exclude many of those who were part of the saga. Families claim the children were taken away from their parents by authorities, who never told them of their fate. They argue that the incidents were not an assortment of unconnected cases but rather reflected policy at the time.
“The time has come that the families whose babies were taken from them receive recognition from the state and the Israeli government and also compensation,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
While compensation “will not atone for the terrible suffering the families have endured and are enduring,” Netanyahu said he hopes the decision will bring “a modicum of comfort, which they deserve.”
He also called on the Education Ministry to include the affair in Israeli history textbooks.
Under the terms of the plan, families will receive NIS 150,000 ($46,000) for each child whose death was made known to them at the time. A sum of NIS 200,000 ($61,000) will be paid for each child whose fate is unknown.
In total, the government will allocate NIS 162 million ($46,600,000) for the compensation plan.
Only families whose cases were already reviewed by one of the three state committees set up over the years to investigate the issue will be eligible to apply for compensation. Requests must be filed between June 1, 2021, and November 30, 2021.
A committee will be established to oversee distribution of the compensation money.
There are 1,050 families that qualify for compensation, according to the Ynet website. Receiving compensation will be dependent on a written commitment to not file any further lawsuits on the matter as well as to close and waive any existing legal action.
The proposal included a declaration that “the government of Israel regrets the events that happened in the early days of the state and recognizes the suffering of families whose children were part of this painful issue.”
“It is not in the power of a financial plan to provide a remedy to the suffering caused to families,” the declaration noted. “However, the State of Israel hopes that it will be able to assist in the process of rehabilitation and healing of the social wound that this affair has created in Israeli society.”
The compensation plan came against the background of several lawsuits by families regarding the matter.
Earlier this year the state declared the cases invalid under the statute of limitations, though Supreme Court has yet to rule on the matter.
Arriving from Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa after Israel’s establishment in 1948, many Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern, immigrants were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined by the European, or Ashkenazi, leaders of the founding Labor party. This painful experience contributed to widespread Mizrahi support for the Likud party, now led by Netanyahu.
Among the immigrants were more than 50,000 Yemenite Jews, often poor and with large families. In the chaos that accompanied their influx, some children died while others were separated from their parents.
But many say the reality was far more sinister, that the establishment kidnapped these children to turn them over for adoption by Ashkenazi families in the belief that they could give them a better life. In later years, families reported being mailed military induction notices and other documents for their supposedly “dead” children, raising more suspicions.
Three high-profile commissions dismissed the claims and found that most children died of disease in immigration camps. The final one, in 2001, said it was possible that some children were handed over for adoption by individual social workers, but not as part of a national conspiracy. However, citing privacy laws, it ordered the testimonies it collected be sealed for 70 years.
The nonprofit Amram Association, one of the leading organizations helping the families, said in a statement Monday that the government plan “is a sought-for step toward the families; however, it is only partial and does not provide a proper and comprehensive response to the case.”
The decision “is missing the most significant component in the process of taking responsibility — an official apology from the state,” Amram said.
“It should be noted that the current decision was made without dialogue with the families and associations active on the issue, and without this component, a process of correction and healing is not possible.”
The group also criticized what it said were “substantial failures such as arbitrary and exclusionary separation between families who have applied to committees, and are entitled to apply for compensation, and families who have not done so.”
It called on the government to find a more comprehensive solution, saying “many of the families did not approach the committees out of distrust of the establishment,” or for other reasons.
Disputed by scholars and seemingly refuted by three state commissions that examined the matter and concluded that most of the children had died while being given medical care, the case has kept resurfacing, not least because most of the families were not given their children’s bodies or informed of their burial places.
Families have noted that many of the children’s death certificates were riddled with errors, and most of the missing children had army draft notices sent to their families 18 years after their alleged deaths. There have also been sporadic cases of adopted children who were able to confirm, through DNA tests, that they were from Yemenite families who were told they had died.
A 2001 report by the Cohen-Kedmi state commission on the issue concluded that there was no evidence of a systematic or state-sponsored effort to remove the children from their families, and that the large majority had died as the families were told — but also that 69 children disappeared without a trace from state hospitals and other institutions, whose representatives then lied to the families about their fate.
The claims have also been tied into the neglect and marginalization with which many Muslim-world Jewish immigrants were greeted when they arrived in an Israel controlled at the time by an Ashkenazi Jewish elite.
AP contributed to this report.
22/02/2021 by THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
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