The family of 17-year-old Hamama Carava doesn’t believe she is buried where state records claim, and a DNA test is to be performed.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

For the first time in the Yemenite Children Affair, the grave of a teenager who disappeared in 1949 was opened Monday to check if the remains were really hers.

Seventeen-year-old Hamama (Yona) Karava, a young mother of one, had checked into Assaf Harofe hospital a few months after her family had arrived in Israel from Yemen. Her husband, Yehuda, went to visit her every day, and one day she was simply gone.

The hospital authorities told him they had no idea what had happened to her, and then, according to his daughter, “they threw him out of the hospital.” He searched for her for years before finally remarrying.

In the late ’40s and early ’50s, some 1,000 Jewish infants and toddlers – mainly of Yemenite, Balkan and Tunisian extraction – disappeared, mostly from hospitals. The parents, new immigrants with limited knowledge of Hebrew and resources, were told that the babies had died and were hastily buried without their families present.

While the main focus of various commissions of inquiry since 1968 has been on the very young, there are some 30 similar cases of young adults between the ages of 17 and 30 who also vanished at the time.

The families have believed for decades that hospital personnel and the state colluded to bring these children to Ashkenazi families of means for adoption. The Kedmi Commission worked for six years, beginning in 1995, and determined that in 972 cases there was documentation that the children had actually died, five were alive, and the fate of 56 was unknown.

Kedmi investigators told Hamama’s son Rahamim that they had found her burial place in the Segula Cemetery in Petach Tikva. However, the name on the headstone does not exactly match that of Rahamim’s mother, marking it as the resting place of Hamama Yosef Omisi.

The mystery surrounding his mother’s disappearance has gnawed at Rahamim for decades.

“I think she was kidnapped and taken for experiments,” Rahamim said tearfully at the cemetery Monday. “We were in Israel for three months and she was hospitalized with stomach pains. Father visited her for a week. She was completely lucid. One day when he came to visit her, she had disappeared.… I want to know what happened, I want to say Kaddish [the Jewish memorial prayer], and if she’s alive, then I want to meet her.”

The charge of medical experimentation was aired during a special Knesset committee meeting in 2016, where testimony was given about four undernourished babies dying after being administered an experimental protein injection.

In 2018, after a mass demonstration, permission was granted to 18 families to exhume the graves that officially contained the remains of their loved ones, so that DNA tests could be run to put their doubts to rest. This case was included by the courts, said family lawyer Rami Tzubari, because the circumstances of Hamama’s disappearance were similar to that of the babies, and neither the documents they have nor the names match the information on her alleged grave.

This is the third grave to be opened so far so that DNA tests could be performed on their remains; the others were of babies.

The first, carried out in May, was done in order to resolve a dispute over whether a toddler, also buried in Segula Cemetery, was a Yemenite child, as the Health Ministry had claimed, or the son of a Tunisian couple. Uziel Houri was taken to the hospital as a one-year-old in 1953, and his family was told that he died, but they do not believe the authorities.

That exhumation was stopped when a second body was found in the grave, and the case has yet to be resolved in court.

In July, the supposed grave of 18-month-old Yosef Melamed was opened in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery near Tel Aviv. His mother, now in her 90s, has always believed that he was kidnapped and adopted in 1947 after being taken to hospital when ill. The family has not told her about the exhumation, fearing what the knowledge would do to her health.

In February 2021, the government approved a decision to “express sorrow” over the affair and compensate the families for their “suffering” with up to NIS 200,000 (appr. $60,000). Only families whose cases have been investigated by the committees of inquiry are entitled to this compensation.

The post Search for ‘stolen’ kids: Teen’s grave opened for first time in Israel’s Yemenite Children Affair appeared first on World Israel News.

Family wins court battle to test remains of their relative, who died mysteriously in the 1950s, but expressed doubts over the integrity of the state’s investigation.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

After a court battle stretching some five years, the family of a boy who mysteriously died in the 1950s was permitted to open his grave and exhume his body for DNA testing on Monday.

Uziel Khoury was born in Israel to parents who had recently immigrated from Tunisia. In 1952, when he was about a year old, he fell ill.

Welfare Services took the boy to a nearby hospital, and his parents were subsequently informed that he had passed away. However, the family never saw the boy’s body.

His sister, Chaya Mazuz, told Kan News that the authorities told the family that he needed treatment “for a month or two and then they’d bring him back.” But after one day, “they called [and said] ‘he died.’ How could it be? It wasn’t even 24 hours.”

The Khoury family was given multiple versions of his cause of death, Mazuz said.

“One time they said it was because they dropped him. Another time they said he had a heart attack and died. Another time they said he had a fever of 40 C (104 F). Every time they said something different.”

She said that her family was “simple” and that they trusted the authorities, but they did find it strange that they were never shown the body.

She added that the Khourys had requested to bury the boy’s body in their northern Israel hometown of Haifa, “but [the authorities] said, there’s no need. We’ll bury him, we’ll do everything. Go home.”

Khoury was buried in Segula Cemetery in the central Israel city of Petah Tikvah. His family believes that DNA testing will reveal that the grave was empty or that the remains inside are not of Khoury.

פרשת היעלמות ילדי תימן, המזרח והבלקן | הוסרה מצבתו של עוזיאל חורי, לקראת פתיחת הקבר היום, במטרה למצוא דגימות DNA שיוכיחו כי הוא אכן קבור במקום. בעת הפתיחה, בני המשפחה שמו לב לשברים בבטון@nataliemetuko pic.twitter.com/0NrYDz6td8

— כאן חדשות (@kann_news) May 23, 2022

Although the exhumation is being video recorded, authorities banned the Khoury family from being present at the cemetery. That raised suspicion with their attorney, Rachel Dotan.

Dotan told Hebrew-language media that it appears that the grave had been previously tampered with and that she has serious doubts about the integrity of the state investigation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Israel’s Health Ministry and Welfare Services seized several thousand sick babies and children from Jewish families of North African, Middle Eastern, and Balkan origin, the majority of them Yemenite, and then informed the parents that their children had died.

The fact that the parents were typically informed of their child’s death after long delays, given contradicting stories about how their children perished and were not allowed to view the bodies led many to believe that their family members had actually been given up for adoption.

While the Israeli government strenuously denied the allegations for decades, even imprisoning those who had advocated on behalf of the families, state authorities have tacitly admitted in recent years that some of the accusations were true.

A report on the matter was recently blocked from being released to the public by the Health Ministry, much to the chagrin of former director-general Dr. Itamar Grotto and other researchers who believe the information must be accessible to Israel’s citizens.

Although the state formally continues to deny the existence of an institutionalized policy of child abduction during the 1950s and 1960s, the government quietly set aside 162 million shekels (about $48 million) in a compensation fund for the families last year.

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State Attorney permits exhumation of 17 graves for genetic testing, hopes findings will shed light on the fate of missing Yemenite children.

By: Margot Dudkevitch, World Israel News

The State Attorney’s office on Tuesday approved the request of 17 families of Yemenite origin, whose children went missing decades ago, to exhume the remains from 17 graves for genetic testing, to determine if they are the remains of family members. The Council of the Chief Rabbinate approved the move as long as the procedure is conducted in accordance with Jewish ritual law.

For decades, more than 1,000 families, mostly immigrants from Yemen, as well as the Balkans, North Africa and other Middle Eastern countries, have maintained their children were kidnapped from hospitals in Israel and put up for adoption. At the time, many parents were told by the authorities their children had died.

Arutz Sheva noted that a number of committees were established over the years to examine the allegations. The Bahlul-Minkowski Committee set up in 1967 revealed that of the 342 cases studied, 316 revealed that the child in question had died, two were adopted and the fate of the remaining 24 children remains unknown.

In the 1980s, an additional investigation found that no conclusive evidence was uncovered to support the fate of the children. In 1995, a State Inquiry Commission was established to probe more than 800 claims but found that in more than 90 percent of the cases, the child died shortly after birth.

In December 2016, the state archives declassified some 400,000 documents concerning the missing Yemenite children’s affair, but the findings were rejected by the families who demanded the government take responsibility. The Knesset recently approved a bill initiated by Knesset member Nurit Koren allowing families of children who went missing, and were later declared dead by the authorities, to apply for court approval to open the graves for DNA authentication.

A statement released by the State Attorney’s office said, “The decision has been made with attention to the public importance of discovering the truth in the matter of the death and burial of minors who came from Yemen, the Orient and the Balkans, whose families were informed of their death in the years following Israel’s establishment. In these circumstances, the attorney’s office has agreed that a warrant will be issued to exhume the bodies and take DNA samples to conduct tests.”

This is not the first time that remains will be exhumed to determine their origin. In 1996, Tzahi Hanegbi, who served as health minister at the time, approved the exhumation of 10 graves in Petah Tikva as part of the investigation into the fate of the missing Yemenite children.

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