Ofer Aderet : Plot thickens in case of missing Israeli children as dozens of new victims emerge
It
was always known that roughly a thousand of Yemenite children
disappeared in the 50s, but Haaretz report has revealed Ashkenazi
children 'disappeared' as well.…
haaretz.com
Some 40 Ashkenazi
families contacted Haaretz over the weekend to reveal that their
children had disappeared from hospitals in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s
— a phenomenon which until recently was thought to have been largely limited to immigrants from Yemen.
The Ashkenazi families were responding to an investigative report in Haaretz on Friday about other Ashkenazi babies who vanished in the early years of the state.
Some
of the families who reacted to the article wanted readers to know their
full stories, while others wished to make known that they, too, were
victims of similar circumstances but preferred not to go public with
their experiences. Haaretz documented half of these testimonies.
Among
them are Jews who came from Lithuania, Austria, Poland, Hungary,
Romania and Ukraine, including a number of Holocaust survivors.
All of them told similar stories about their babies who had disappeared from various hospitals in Israel. All were told that their infants had died, but were never shown either a death certificate or a grave.
These
20 cases come in the wake of dozens of other instances documented by
Haaretz over the past few weeks. They show that the scope of the
phenomenon of disappeared children born to Ashkenazi families is wider
than previously described by the state investigative committee that
examined the cases of disappeared Yemenite babies.
That
report, released in 2001, included only 30 cases of children from the
United States or Europe who were said to have disappeared soon after
birth, as opposed to hundreds of cases of children born to Yemenite
families.
Some
of the cases Haaretz learned about over the weekend involve twins, one
of whom vanished after birth. Such is the story of the London family
from Lithuania. The mother, Hannah, came to live in Israel in 1933 as a
pioneer and a member of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. The father,
Shmuel, came to Israel the same year. The two met in Ramat Gan and were
married in 1939. On December 17, 1940, their twins, Avraham and Yaakov,
were born at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikvah.
“Yaakov
came back with mother from the hospital. Avraham stayed ‘to get
stronger.’ My mother was told he was born smaller and it was better for
him to stay in the hospital,” their daughter, who asked that her name
not be publicized, said. Later, when the parents went back to the
hospital to take Avraham home, they were told that he had died while
being fed.
“They
never received a document about it,” the daughter said. “My mother
accepted what they told her, and later told this story as an anecdote,
not as something special,” she added. “Maybe he really did die, but it’s
still interesting to find out what happened,” she said.
The
family’s tragedy did not end there. Yaakov, who eventually obtained a
Ph.D. in biochemistry, was killed in the Yom Kippur War, leaving a wife
and two daughters.
“It’s important to know that cases like these happened even before the establishment of the state. It happened to us,” she said.
Documentation
of a disappearance from a hospital in 1940 is rare. Most of the cases
happened in the first years following the establishment of the state.
One case, documented by this reporter, involved the disappearance of a
baby born in the detention camp in Cyprus in 1947.
Yitzhak
Fueurstein also turned to Haaretz over the weekend. He is the son of
Holocaust survivors Pirha (Piri), born in Transylvania (a region between
Romania and Hungary) and Binyamin, born in Munkatch (then
Czechoslovakia, now Ukraine). Fueurstein’s parents met in Germany as
refugees and came to live in Israel in 1947 after being expelled from
the British detention camp on Cyprus.
In
1949 Piri gave birth to twin boys at Rambam Hospital in Haifa. “The
birth was normal according to my parents,” Fueurstein said. But about a
week later, when his mother was released from the hospital, the parents
were given a birth certificate on which the two births appeared, but
next to one was the word “deceased.” They were given no other document
or death certificate, Fueurstein said.
“The story hovered around our household all the time, leaving many questions in the air,” he added.
Twins
Israel and Yosef, the sons of Holocaust survivors Moshe and Regina
(Rivka) Raflenski, were born on October 8, 1948 in Hadassah Hospital,
which was then in Tel Aviv. At six weeks old Israel he was rushed to the
hospital with diarrhea. His parents — who had come to Israel from
Poland — were told to leave their sick son there and go home. When they
came to visit him the next day, they were told that he had died.
“His
mother called him Israel in the hope of new life in the land of Israel.
He never had a funeral, no death certificate was ever presented and of
course, he has no grave,” the daughter of Yosef, Israel’s brother, said.
She also asked that her name not be used.
Then,
one day the family received a draft notice for Israel, which stated
that he was a deserter. “All through the years his status in the
Interior Ministry was defined as “unknown.” Recently I found out that
his status was changed to ‘deceased.’ We are trying, without success, to
find out any sliver of information about the lost son,” she added.
“The
article in Haaretz on Friday opened up a new wound,” Hannah Gold
Levkovich said. Her mother, Shulamit Denishevsky, was born in the town
of Ashmyany, near the Lithuanian city of Vilnius. Her father, Yehoshua
Gold, was born in the city of Ropczyce, near Krakow in Poland. They met
after World War II in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and married.
In
1948, after the state was founded, they came to live in Israel. In the
summer of 1949 they had a son at the Dajani (Tzahalon) Hospital in
Jaffa. “The birth was normal. The child was big and healthy, but he was
taken away immediately,” Levkovich told Haaretz over the weekend. A few
hours later they were told their son had died. “They were shown no
proof,” Levkovich said.
Report Sparks Dozens of New Testimonies of Ashkenazi Kids Disappearing, Some in Pre-state Israel
Haaretz receives new reports about sets of twins born in Israel,
where one baby stayed in the hospital and was never seen again. 'Could
my brother be alive'? asks a surviving sibling.
The Kupfer family in 1947. Shoshana, whose twin brother disappeared, is being held by her father.Courtesy of the family.
One of the earliest
photos of Shoshana Shani, née Kupfer, shows her in the arms of her
father, Shmuel, a handkerchief on her head, at the family table. The
sadness in her father’s eyes as he holds the baby seems to hint at the
tragedy he and his wife, Sara-Rivka, had experienced a few months
earlier, shortly after Shani's birth.
Shani is one of the more than 100 people who had contacted Haaretz as of Sunday night following its report last Friday on Ashkenazi children who disappeared from hospitals around the country
in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Among them were apparently some 15 cases
of Ashkenazi families who gave birth to twins – only to have one of them
disappear shortly after birth.
Shani’s
parents emigrated from Hungary in 1933 and married two years later.
Shoshana, their fourth child, was born at Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv
on July 7, 1947, “together with a twin brother,” she told Haaretz on
Sunday. “But I learned that only when I was 12, by chance, in a
conversation with people I knew on the street.”
When
she asked her mother what happened to her twin, her mother replied, “A
big, evil nurse entered the room two or three days after [he was born]
and told me, ‘Enough, you don’t have a son, he’s dead.’” Only much later
did Shani, who now lives in Petah Tikva, begin thinking that her mother
was “too innocent.”
“She
accepted the verdict without asking questions,” Shani said. “But I am
asking: Is it possible that my brother is alive? Can I find out? Could
he, too, be living with an adopted family?”
Shulamit
Bar-Tal, who works today for an engineering company in Be’er Sheva,
also contacted Haaretz on Sunday. “I suspect there was something
systematic here,” she said. “That someone decided to take one child from
a pair of twins, on the theory that ‘one is enough,’ and that the
parents could get along without the second.”
A
few weeks ago, Bar-Tal said she heard on the radio about a woman born
in the 1950s at a hospital in Hadera, whose twin sister disappeared
after the birth. “This story lit a red light for me, because it’s
similar to mine,” she said.
Bar-Tal's
parents were born in Hungary in the 1920s. Her father, Mordechai
Tushek, was incarcerated in several concentration camps during the
Holocaust. Her mother Bracha, née Klafter, jumped from the train
transporting her and others to a concentration camp and hid in a
convent. After World War II, the couple immigrated to Israel and lived
in an immigrant transit camp in Nes Tziona. Their first child, Bluma,
died when she was a few months old.
In
1951, Bar-Tal and her twin sister were born. “After the birth, they
told my mother that during the birth, I had pushed my twin sister, I
gave her a blow, and she was born dead,” Bar-Tal recalled.
As
was true in apparently many other similar cases from that time, her
mother never saw the dead baby, didn’t receive a death certificate and
doesn’t know where, or even if, the infant was buried.
“All
my life, I’ve lived with this terrible guilt, that I pushed my sister
during birth and gave her a blow – that it’s my fault I don’t have a
sister,” Bar-Tal said. “As if it weren’t enough that my parents were
Holocaust survivors and their childhood taken from them, as if they
didn’t know how to raise children.
“I’ve
always had this doubt, that maybe...,” she continued. “But as you hear
more and more stories, you understand that what they told you isn’t 100
percent true. Maybe someone really thought it was better for my parents
to raise an only daughter. How happy I would be if I found I had a
sister. The question is how [I would do that].”
Yehezkel
Brot, an accountant from Kfar Sava, said that Haaretz’s report last
week “overwhelmed me with an issue that has followed me like a shadow
all my life.” He was particularly struck by the story of Hannah and
Shmuel London, which appeared in Haaretz’s follow-up report on Sunday.
The
Londons, who emigrated from Lithuania in 1933 and married in Ramat Gan
in 1939, gave birth to twin sons, Avraham and Yaakov, at Beilinson
Hospital in Petah Tikva in 1940.
“Yaakov
came back with Mother from the hospital,” the Londons’ daughter, who
asked that her name not be published, told Haaretz. “Avraham stayed ‘to
get stronger.’ My mother was told he was born smaller and it was better
for him to stay in the hospital.” Later, when the Londons went back to
the hospital to see how Avraham was doing – they were told he had died.
“Something
similar was said to my parents about one of the twins they had,” Brot
said Sunday. “That sentence was said to my parents at about the same
time, regarding the death of my twin brother, who stayed behind ‘to get
stronger.’”
Brot’s
father, Alexander (Sander), was born in 1913 in Lubicz, Poland, and
immigrated to Palestine in 1933 through the Hapoel Hamizrahi
organization. His mother, Zehava (Golda), née Barshap, was born in 1914
in Kremenets, Poland (today part of Ukraine), and also arrived in the
country in 1933. They were married in Herzliya in 1940; three years
later, on August 25, 1943, they gave birth to twins at Hadassah Hospital
in Tel Aviv.
“My
parents told me my brother was the stronger of us, but for some reason,
they gave me, the weak one with no chance to live, to my parents to
take care of while my brother, the strong one, was sent to WIZO for
‘monitoring,’” Brot said, referring to the Women’s International Zionist
Organization. His parents were told this was because “you can’t take
care of two babies, given your financial situation.”
A
few days later, his parents were told their strong son had died. “His
place of burial is unknown,” said Brot, who discovered only years later
that his twin brother had disappeared. “I think his name was Hanoch.”
“Personally,
it’s hard for me to accept the idea of a conspiracy,” he added. “But as
time passed and other similar cases were reported, I’ve started to
think that perhaps my twin brother is living among us here in Israel.
All my efforts to locate a grave, a death certificate or any relevant
document whatsoever have failed. In my view, the public effort must
concentrate on finding such children, if they exist – not on seeking
those responsible for their disappearance.”
There
are also many documented cases of Yemenite twins disappearing about the
time of the establishment of the State of Israel. A 2001 report by a
state commission of inquiry into these missing Yemenite children listed
18 cases in which one member of a set of twins disappeared, 17 cases in
which both twins disappeared (including two sets of twins from a single
family), and one case in which all three members of a set of triplets
disappeared. In total, this adds up to 55 children, out of a total of
more than 1,000 Yemenite children who disappeared from Israeli
hospitals.
Haaretz
has also been contacted over the last few days by families from other
Middle Eastern countries who lost one of a set of twins shortly after
birth. One such couple is Gavriel and Rachel Almasi, who moved to Israel
from Iran in 1951. Rachel gave birth to twins at Hillel Yaffeh Medical
Center in Hadera in 1952.
“One
was dark, but the other was fair and looked Ashkenazi,” the twins’
brother, Yaakov Almasi, told Haaretz on Sunday. “My late mother took
them home, but two or three days later one of them, the fair one, didn’t
feel well and was brought back to the hospital.”
The
next day, when his mother went to the hospital to visit the baby, she
was told her daughter had died. “How did she die?" Almasi asked
incredulously. "All she had was a cold, and even that isn’t certain.”
The
hospital told his parents the baby was buried in the Zichron Yaakov
cemetery, so they went there to find her grave. “My parents were
illiterates with no money, so they asked an educated man, who knew how
to read and write, to join them,” Almasi explained. “They searched and
searched, but they didn’t find a grave.”
For
years, his mother claimed that her daughter had been stolen. “We didn’t
get any documentation of her death,” said Almasi. “A child from our
family. We want to know what happened to her.”
Ofer Aderet
Haaretz Correspondent
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