It was the mid-1960s, and something odd was happening. Families who had arrived in Israel 15 years earlier—most but not all from Yemen—were getting IDF summons for their teenage children’s initial checkups. Yet their children had died as infants, and the letters seemed a cruel mockery. Unless … well, many of the grieving parents hadn’t actually seen the bodies of their dead children. They had come to the hospital ward one day and had been told, brusquely in most cases, that their child had died.
Bewildered as they were by their circumstances, which involved coming from a distant country and often living in large and confusing refugee camps, they had meekly accepted the word of the doctors. Now, as the stories accumulated, they began wondering. Perhaps their children were still alive, somewhere? Had Godless European-Israeli socialists been running a secret policy of kidnapping the babies of religious Middle Eastern immigrants, and keeping them as their own?
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