In 1949, Benaye Farhi walked for 40 days across Yemen's desert to reach Israel, refusing to ride a camel for fear she would miscarry. Six weeks after her daughter Shoshana was born in the Promised Land, the child disappeared.
Israeli authorities told her Shoshana died in a hospital, but Benaye Farhi and her husband never got a body to bury or a death certificate. The Farhis believe their child was stolen and given or sold to a Jewish couple.The Farhis' story is not unique. Tales of missing children are so widespread in Israel's Yemenite community that two government commissions investigated the affair, and a third is now at work.
The first two commissions looked into the cases of 643 missing Yemenite children and found that 542 died, four were adopted and 87 could not be accounted for. The panels attributed the disappearances to the chaos of mass immigration in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
But leaders of the Yemenite community dismiss the findings as a whitewash. They claim thousands of newborns were systematically taken from their parents under the pretense they were sick and given or sold to Jewish couples of European origin.
The disappearances have left a festering wound in Israeli society and underscore the continued rift between Jews of European and Middle Eastern origin.
In the spring of 1994, self-proclaimed Yemenite leader Uzi Meshulam and armed followers barricaded themselves in a house in a Tel Aviv for six weeks to press demands for a new inquiry into the fate of the children.
Meshulam was seized in a shootout with police and is serving a 61/2-year prison term. However, the confrontation created enough of a furor to spur the government to form a third commission, this one with the power of subpoena.
The panel has already broken some new ground.
The first two commissions said Shoshana Farhi died on March 3, 1950, and was buried in a cemetery in the Ein Shemer camp for Yemenite immigrants near the northern coastal town of Hadera.
However, members of the new panel visited Ein Shemer and found that the first gravestones there dated to 1959.
Last month, Benaye Farhi, 68, returned to Ein Shemer to tell her story. A flowered scarf covering her still-black hair, Benaye Farhi stood in front of the British army barracks that housed three families to a room 47 years ago.
Benaye Farhi said she gave birth to Shoshana, who had a birthmark on her forehead, in December 1949. After 10 days in an area hospital, she was asked to give Shoshana to nurses at Ein Shemer's children's house, the only heated building in the camp.
The practice of Israel's socialist pioneers to raise children in communal homes was strange to the family-oriented Yemenites. But in those days, the newcomers didn't question the authorities.
It also made some sense in the harsh living conditions, with rain turning the ground to mud and tents collapsing under the weight of one of the century's worst snowstorms.
For six weeks, Benaye Farhi went five times daily to the nursery to breast-feed Shoshana. But one day, the nurses refused to let her in.
They told Benaye Farhi, who spoke little Hebrew, that Shoshana was sick and had been sent to a hospital. Come back in a week, she was told. She did, but her daughter was not returned.
Her voice rising, Benaye Farhi remembered how a heavyset nurse finally told her Shoshana was dead, then chased her away, first shouting in Hebrew, then in Arabic, "Go, go, get out of here!"
Journalist Yigal Mashiah, who investigated the disappearances for the Haaretz daily, wrote that he encountered similar tales over and over. "In hundreds of cases, parents were told their children had died. None of the people I interviewed ever saw a body," Mashiah wrote.
Ein Shemer residents told Mashiah how a nurse and an ambulance driver would make the rounds at the camp, stopping at a tent or barracks and pronouncing a child sick and in need of hospital care.
Parents would later search unsuccessfully for their children at hospitals. They would hear about the child's death over a loudspeaker mounted on a van driving through the camp, Haaretz said.
The immigrants initially believed the authorities. But suspicions arose in the 1960s when parents began to receive draft notices for children that had been declared dead.
Ami Hovev, an investigator for the two previous commissions, said most of the disappearances were a result of confusion. For example, he said children often got lost because clerks did not properly register their names before taking them to the hospital.
When the children recovered, officials often did not know how to find their parents, said Hovev.
The unclaimed children were taken to nurseries run by the Women's International Zionist Organization. When no parents showed up, the children were put up for adoption, Hovev told Haaretz.
WIZO world president Michal Modai also blamed chaos. She said the organizations has opened its archives to the government inquiry. "We too want to find out the truth," she said.
But leaders of the Yemenite community claimed children were sold to Jewish couples. Benaye Farhi's son Avner, a journalist who has been investigating the disappearances, said he believed some 2,000 children vanished that way.
Asked for a possible motive, Farhi and others said the country was short of money and sold the children for $5,000 each.
Others said the root problem was the paternalistic attitude of Israel's European-born founders toward the newcomers from the Middle East.
Israeli journalist Uri Avneri, who first investigated the disappearances in the 1960s, said social workers in many cases decided the children would be better off with established families than with their families in the camps.
Such explanations do little to ease the pain for the Farhi family.
"We cry about Shoshana all the time," said Mrs. Farhi's eldest daughter, Yona, 53. "I held my children when they were young and thought, here is my sister in my arms."