In the early days of the State of Israel, numerous infants born to Yemenite immigrants disappeared after hospitalization. Many families have long suspected that their children were secretly transferred to adoptive families. A new medical study of hospital records suggests that these infants were indeed forcibly separated from their parents, but for reasons that couldn’t be more different – or tragic

Until recently, plagues were a thing of the past. Yet now quarantines, lockdowns, and protective gear have suddenly become part of our everyday lives. These difficult circumstances may shed new light on a painful tragedy from the State of Israel’s early years.

Mass immigration – Holocaust survivors, North African Jews, and the bulk of Yemenite Jewry – was threatening to overwhelm the country’s already overburdened health and housing facilities. Amid fears of epidemics, immigrant parents and relatives – mostly from Yemen or the eastern Balkans – handed over their infants to hospitals and clinics, sometimes under pressure from medical staff. Hundreds of families never saw their children again. Death notices were forwarded by camp authorities and health care professionals, but the bodies were never returned for burial. Many parents were notified only long afterward, sometimes purely thanks to the efforts of three separate commissions of inquiry.

Even before the disappearance of these children was first discussed in the Knesset in 1950, rumors and suspicions abounded. The most common theory is that the babies were put up for adoption or perhaps even sold to wealthy families in Israel and abroad. 

The questions at the heart of the controversy – why were apparently healthy children hospitalized, and did they in fact die? – are essentially medical. Yet two crucial health factors have never been taken into account: Yemen’s high infant mortality rate at the time, and the harsh conditions endured both en route to Israel and in absorption facilities there. Examination of these historical realities reveals a story no less dreadful than that of kidnapping and forced adoptions.

 

On Eagles’ Wings

The first large influx of Yemenite Jews into Ottoman Palestine occurred in the late 19th century. They subsequently trickled in, playing their own unique role in building the State of Israel. The vast majority of Yemen’s remaining Jews – some fortyfive thousand – picked up after Pesach in 1949 and set out for the Promised Land. For weeks, they traveled mostly on foot from their villages in Yemen’s windy, hilly interior to Aden, a major Red Sea port and British crown colony. From here, they were airlifted to Israel.

Yemen had no modern medical system – the only Western-trained doctor in the country was that of the royal family. Moreover, both oral testimonies and medical records show that Yemenite Jews’ health declined as a result of their long trek to the coast. Along the way, they suffered from malnutrition, malaria, bilharzia (snail fever), tropical ulcers, typhus, typhoid, trachoma, and tuberculosis. To make matters worse, they were cooped up in Hashed, a desert transit camp forty-three miles from Aden and built for a mere fifteen hundred. 

The Hashed camp quickly registered a staggering infection rate that only increased as the scorching summer wore on. Though individuals’ weight may have been underestimated so as to maximize the numbers on each flight leaving for Israel, they were clearly malnourished, especially the infants. The deteriorating health situation in the camp convinced Prime Minister David BenGurion to bring everyone to the Jewish state immediately (without the medical checkups or treatments required of Holocaust refugees and immigrants from North Africa). Hence the undercover Operation On Eagles’ Wings, also known as Operation Magic Carpet.

Two-thirds were sent to a “temporary” camp in Rosh Ha-ayin, another quarter was placed in a facility near Kibbutz Ein Shemer, and the rest were divided among other absorption centers or reunited with family living in Israel. Essentially, the Yemenites had simply exchanged the transit camp in Aden for the same conditions in the Jewish state – living in tents with no electricity or running water, no sewers, and no jobs. They no longer even had any belongings, as the few goods they’d lugged with them through the desert didn’t fit on the cramped aircraft transporting them to the Holy Land.  

On arrival, like all immigrants to Israel, the Jews of Yemen were subjected to careful medical examination. But malnutrition had lowered their resistance to infection, and modern disease control measures were completely alien to them.