Adoption files to be opened in lost Yemenite children affair

The Knesset approves a bill to allow families who came to Israel from Yemen in the early days of the state to find out whether children they claim were kidnapped from them were put up for adoption.

According to the new law, anyone who is concerned that a close relative may have been taken from the family and put up for adoption can request a senior social worker to check the records to see if their relative’s name appears there.

If the relative was put up for adoption, the attorney general will be notified, and he will ask the courts to decide whether to give the details of the adoption to the family seeking their missing relative.

Currently, anyone who has been adopted may search for his or her family upon reaching the age of 18. However, families seeking children who have disappeared did not previously have access to the adoption files.

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.

Likd MK Nurit Koren, who chairs the Knesset caucus tasked with researching the Yemenite Children Affair, and who had a cousin who disappeared, praises the new law.

“This is a historic, revolutionary law that will provide the families with answers,” she says.