300,000 unpublished files on Yemenite immigrant children still in state archive

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked instructs the Israel State Archives to release some 300,000 unpublished files relating to the children of Yemenite immigrants, whose arrival in Israel over half a century ago has been at the center of a lingering controversy over their fate.

The Knesset Committee for Archives, chaired by Shaked, hears on Sunday that the hundreds of thousands of Israel Police files have not been published in the past and that their existence was apparently largely unknown.

Since the 1950s, more than 1,000 families — mostly immigrants from Yemen, but also dozens from the Balkans, North Africa, and other Middle Eastern countries — have alleged their children were systematically kidnapped from Israeli hospitals and put up for adoption, sometimes abroad, in what is known as the Yemenite children affair.

Shaked tells the State Archives to conduct a review of the files and then release them. She also instructs the Israel Defense Forces to release relevant statistics it has about the Yemenite children, on condition that they do not impact the privacy of individuals, Army Radio reports.