Police locate two girls feared abducted by their mother while visiting from US

Police said they have located two young girls who had lost contact with their father during a visit from the United States amid growing suspicions they had been abducted by their mother.

Police said early Tuesday that the mother was caught with the children in the northern town of Kiryat Yam. She was arrested and police took the children into custody to be reunited with their father at a police station in Haifa.

Liba Goldschmidt, 8, and Sara Goldschmidt, 12, were last seen with their mother in the central city of Gedera, where their grandmother lives, around 4 a.m. on Sunday last week. On Monday, police cleared for publication that the grandmother, 70, has been arrested over her suspected involvement in alleged abduction.

Police had been conducting a search for the two girls since last week when the eldest daughter expressed concern to her father, Ofer, who is divorced from the suspect, that her mother was planning on abducting them. He then lost contact with the children, and the three did not show up to their pre-planned meeting in Tel Aviv on Friday according to reports in the Hebrew-language media.

The parents were married in Israel and moved a decade ago to the United States, where their daughters were born. After their divorce, a US court ruled on a joint custody arrangement between the two.

According to a court ruling, the mother was allowed to bring the two daughters on a vacation to Israel, on the condition she let the girls speak to their father once a day and that she show up for a scheduled meeting to hand the girls over to the father.

Police opened the investigation upon receiving a complaint from the girls’ father, who also came to Israel on a vacation, that they did not show up to their meeting on Friday, and that contact with his children had ceased.

“She’s trying to run away with us I think not now though like I think her plan is that or maybe now idk,” the daughter texted her father days before the meeting, adding that the mother may try to flee with them to Europe.

“Mommy wants to kidnap us today!!” the daughter wrote in texts published by Hebrew media outlets. “She said she is going to buy a wig for people not to recognize her,” she added.

The father then asked where she was, to which she replied they were going to their grandmother’s in Gedera.

“She will kidnap us when we get there,” she said.

Ronen Avniel, the Shfela district police chief, had told media outlets that there was a “fear for the lives of the girls.”

The father told the Walla news site Monday that he spent the weekend with relatives in northern Israel, without his daughters as was planned.

“I couldn’t really sleep because of so many worrying thoughts,” he said. “It is difficult for me to know where they are. They are smart and my older daughter is already more mature and has a resourceful character. I know she will know what to do, heaven forbid, if bad things happen.”

“I also know that for sure she thinks about me and trusts me. When she sent me her text messages, I promised her that if they were abducted, I would save them,” he stated.

He said that the former couple has an older son whom the mother is only allowed to see under supervision. He added that, based on texts from his daughters, he believes that his ex-wife was assisted by someone in the suspected abduction and that the grandmother may have encouraged it.