Full Description
This edited collection brings together leading scholars in their field to discuss the Yemenite Children Affair including the health crisis, the public demand for an investigation, and the public discourse surrounding it. The Yemenite Children Affair was a tragic health crisis in which about 1,000 babies and toddlers died between 1949 and 1954. In most cases, the parents did not witness the death of their children and did not attend their funerals. Over the years, rumors spread that the babies had not died but were kidnapped by the Israeli authorities and sold to childless Ashkenazi or Holocaust survivors in Israel and the United States.
These rumors eventually created a public demand for an investigation. The contributors to this book analyze the policy and health challenges surrounding immigration to Israel in the 1950s, Operation Magic Carpet, the archives on the Yemenite Children Affair and public discourse surrounding it, testimonies at commissions, among other topics. Scholars of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Middle Eastern studies, public health, and political science will find this book of particular interest.
Contents
Chapter 1
Policy, Medicine, and Health Challenges during the Great Immigration to Israel in the 1950s
Dorit Weiss and Shifra Shvarts
Chapter 2
A Continuous Tragedy: From "Operation Magic Carpet" to the "Yemenite Children Affair"
Esther Meir-Glitzenstein
Chapter 3
The Absorption Circumstances of the Yemenite Jewry in Israel and the Historical Association to the "Missing Yemenite Children Affair"
Dov Levitan
Chapter 4
The Missing Children's Epidemiological Database: The Lights and Shadows of Interlocking Historical Sources and Perspectives
Adiya Shubi and Yechiel Michael Barilan
Chapter 5
The Archive and the Public Discourse
Roy Peled
Chapter 6
The Documents Don't Matter: The Affair of the Yemenite Children and the Archives
Yaacov Lozowick
Chapter 7
Testimonies at the Committees of Inquiry over the Years into the Yemenite Children Affair and Insights for Oral History
Avi Picard
Chapter 8
The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory of the Yemenite Children Affair: From Ultra-Orthodoxy, Meir Kahane, and Israel's Radical Left
Sariel Birnbaum
Chapter 9
Uzi Meshulam and the Yemenite Children Affair: Messianic Expectations, Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy, and Israel's Radical Right
Motti Inbari
Chapter 10
The Israeli Left and the Yemenite Children Affair: How a Post-Colonial Narrative Became an "Alternative Truth" in Radical Left Circles in Israel
Nirit Ben Ari
