Behind the Headlines; Yemenite Sect Leader Brings New Focus to Issue of Missing Yemenite Children

For 45 years, Israel’s tight-knit Yemenite community has maintained that thousands of Yemenite children who supposedly died in early childhood were actually kidnapped from their parents in the 1940s and 1950s, and given up for adoption.

Leaders in the community charged that the government deliberately separated children from their parents in order to give them to childless Holocaust survivors or to sell them on the black market.

Since the earliest years of the state, Israeli officials have categorically denied charges of a government conspiracy. Some have conceded, however, that a few of the 4,500 children in question could have become “displaced” through human error.

Now, more than four decades since the first children vanished without a trace, the issue is back in the headlines. Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, a 42-year-old Yemenite leader who is now in prison on charges of weapons possession and incitement, has embraced the issue as his cause.

Meshulam, a former intelligence officer, claims to have documents proving that government officials in the late ’40s and early ’50s stole Yemenite children and then sold them to overseas brokers as a means of earning cash for the fledgling state.

He claims that most of the children are alive, and that the present government is with-holding this information from parents.

In March, Meshulam and a group of his followers made the news by holing up in the rabbi’s house and demanding an investigation into the whereabouts of the missing Yemenite children.

The standoff was seen as similar to that of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, last year.

But the Israeli authorities, perhaps with the fiery end of that situation in mind, retreated to avoid a confrontation and possible loss of life.

On May 10, however, the police ended the six-week-old siege with a dawn raid on Meshulam’s home. One of his followers was killed.

Upon entering the house, the police found a stockpile of weapons, including automatic weapons and grenades.

MESHULAM SEEN AS HERO BY YEMENITE COMMUNITY

Last week, Meshulam and 11 of his hardcore followers were arraigned in Tel Aviv District Court on charges of illegally erecting barriers to protect the house, attacking police officers and calling on sect members “to kill and be killed.”

But while government officials and the media depict Meshulam as a cult leader with violent tendencies, the Yemenite community has deemed him a hero.

Recently, dozens of Yemenite women attended a protest rally to demand the release of “Rav Uzi” and an investigation into the status of the missing children.

Oone of the older women, recalling how her infant daughter had disappeared 40 years ago, let out a heart-rending scream that silenced the crowd and a dozen-or-so onlookers.

Sitting on the ground, Sara Zacharani recited her story for anyone who would listen.

Nine months pregnant when she immigrated to Israel from Yemen in the early 1950s, Zacharani gave birth to a healthy baby girl in an immigrant tent camp.

Now 60, Zacharani recalled her daughter’s birth clearly. “I gave birth in the tent,” she said, “and a nurse named Sarah came to check me and the baby. The next day the nurse brought two other women — they weren’t Yemenite — who took a special interest in the baby.

“A month after I gave birth, Sarah urged me to put the baby, a beautiful girl with black hair and blue eyes, into the children’s house, and to come and nurse her every four hours.”

OFFICIALS WOULDN’T SAY WHERE BABY’S GRAVE WAS

Zacharani did as she was told. She recalled that, “the first day after taking her to the children’s house, I nursed at 6 a.m. and everything was fine. When I arrived back at 10 o’clock, I was told the baby had died.”

When Zacharani and her husband asked to see the baby’s body, “the authorities told us that she had already been buried. We asked where the grave was, but they wouldn’t tell us. They didn’t even give us a death certificate.”

Unable to speak Hebrew and unfamiliar with Israeli bureaucracy, the couple did not pursue the issue any further.

About 20 years later, when the Zacharanis’ son wanted to change his name, he discovered something odd. An Interior Ministry listing of the Zacharani family listed his dead sister as alive.

Several other women described how, a few months before their supposedly dead children or siblings would have turned 18, the government sent out draft notices.

“If my brother died 35 years ago, something I never believed, why did the government want to draft him?” asked Tzipora Naga, aged 40.

According to Dov Levitan, a Bar-Ilan University researcher who looked into the disappearance of 650 Yemenite children, these families should not hold out much hope of finding their children alive.

“Of the cases I studied, about 90 percent died. I believe that between 45 and 65 of the children are probably still alive,” he said.

Levitan dismisses Meshulam as a “charlatan” and believes that the rabbi has no proof to implicate the government or anyone else.

Still, Levitan believes that the government must come clean about the 10 percent who may still be alive, in order to lay the matter to rest.

In 1988, the government created the Shalgi Commission to investigate the matter, but the commission has not yet come to any conclusions.

Levitan attributed the government’s foot-dragging to the fear that any inquiry into how Jews from Muslim countries were absorbed “could have political consequences when it comes to reelection.”

Asked why the government has not done more to get to the truth, the Prime Minister’s Office told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Some time ago, the government of Israel appointed a commission of inquiry headed by Judge Shalgi, to investigate the matter of the Yemenite children. We are waiting to receive the commission’s conclusions and recommendations.”