Hundreds of thousand of documents from the state's investigations into the disappearance of Yemenite children in the early years of Israel's founding were made public Wednesday, after decades of being classified. The documents have been scanned and catalogued, and are in storage at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and State Archivist Dr. Yaakov Lazovik launched the "I Ask for My Brothers" database, which contains 210,000 documents about the children's disappearance. Many documents in the case remain classified until the original 70-year embargo placed on the investigation's records elapses. Hanegbi, who was tasked by Netanyahu with determining which of the documents could be made public, said he hoped the families could find closure. "After many years of unwarranted classification, the documents from the investigative committees that dealt with the lost children affair will be disclosed. The tormented families, who have waited for this moment for a long time and already lost hope, can finally try to understand what became of their loved ones. This is a courageous, important and unprecedented step in the effort to rebuild trust and heal the rifts in Israeli society," he said. From 1948 to 1954, hundreds of parents who immigrated to Israel from Yemen and other countries were told that their babies or young children had died. The parents were never shown the children's bodies. Authorities claimed they had been buried, despite not providing parents with death certificates or autopsy findings. The families have claimed for years that their babies were taken from them and handed over to other families for adoption without their consent. After two earlier investigations, the Cohen-Kedmi Committee, the third government commission of inquiry into the affair, was established in 1995. Of the 1,053 suspected cases the committee inspected in its seven years of activity, 979 of the babies were found to have died during childbirth or shortly thereafter, while 69 were listed as "whereabouts unknown," 13 were found to have remained in Yemen, and five were located. The committee determined it was possible that social workers gave some of the babies to other families for adoption. When the findings were published in 2001, the government placed the committee protocols under gag order until 2071. The families of the missing babies were not provided with the committee's findings. They claimed the children had not died, but were kidnapped and adopted by childless or small families. Netanyahu charged Hanegbi with reviewing the materials from the Kedmi-Cohen Committee and recommending which materials could be published. Along with Lezovak and the Justice Ministry's Freedom of Information Unit, Hanegbi formulated a framework, authorized by the Knesset last week, to make the documents accessible to the public. Hanegbi said the government had "acknowledged its obligation to act quickly to work to disclose the
affair concerning the disappearance of Yemenite children, as well as children from other countries." However, individuals and organizations that for decades have been urging the state to make the documents public said the move was yet another attempt to avoid paying financial restitution to the families. Dr. Moshe Nachum, head of the World Federation of Yemenite Jews, claims his three-month-old niece, Ziona Kohlani, was kidnapped at Tel Aviv's Hadassah Medical Center. "The call that was recently made to issue DNA testing is nonsense," he said. "The fact is that most of the 'children' do not come to get tested, because they don't want to hurt the parents who adopted them. To me, the injustice that was done and the kidnapping of our children needs to be recognized, just as with the malicious and intentional theft of Torah scrolls that were taken and the jewelry that was stolen. We must get everything we can out in the open. Enough with the secrecy."
Avner Farhi, head of the Yemenite Children Association, said that "releasing the documents has academic importance, and the online database is user friendly, as the State Archives did a great job. But we won't be able to learn what happened to the children from these documents -- everything has been heavily redacted and made to have no legal significance."
