Q&A: Yemenite Children
Yemenite Children
Question
What is your opinion on the Yemenite Children affair? On the one hand, there are many stories and testimonies about children who “disappeared,” and that raises a real question. On the other hand, it seems impossible that for all these years such a “huge conspiracy” could have been hidden and that they still haven’t found even a single crack in it that would provide better evidence than similar stories (which may perhaps be coordinated or influenced by one another). When I say a crack, I mean, for example, parents who in a moment of candor told their son that he was Yemenite, or someone from the kidnapping operation who admitted that this is what was done, or matching tissue samples, etc.
Answer
You described the dilemma well. I have nothing to add.
Discussion on Answer
I can say that my father’s aunt was kidnapped at a young age, and her parents were told that she had passed away, and then after a few years they discovered that she was alive in the United States. So yes, it exists, and what you are writing here is old racism that I thought had disappeared from the world.
No one said that Holocaust survivors kidnapped her, Heaven forbid. I also don’t think they would do such a thing after everything they went through. Some unofficial arm of the state did it. And the parents did not necessarily know that they were kidnapped!
This is a blood libel.
It never happened; it was entirely fabricated.
Not every Ukrainian child who died or disappeared or ran away from his parents means that Jews murdered him and kneaded his blood into matzah.
Not every Yemenite child who died—and in numbers even smaller than his siblings who died in Yemen before immigration (in 1993 too, about a third of the children in Yemen died…)
means that Ashkenazim, Holocaust survivors, kidnapped him.
I knew many Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who died childless, without Yemenite children around them (I lived across from the old-age home).