The parents Menachem and Adela Dov immigrated from Iraq in January 1951, and were married in September 1951. On June 21, 1952 my eldest sister, Tzippora, was born. Back then, my parents lived at Kfar Ata transit camp, or Ein Hamifratz. On July 2, my mother took my sister to see the doctor at Kfar Ata and he recommended that she take Tzippora to Rambam because he suspected she had jaundice. When she took Tzippora to Rambam Hospital, the doctors told her to leave her for inspection and return to breastfeed her the next day. When she arrived at the hospital the next morning, she couldn't find her in the toddler room where she had left her the day before. A nurse passed through the corridor and my mother went up to her and asked: where is my daughter... The nurse referred her to a certain room where she was told she would receive an answer. When she entered the room, she found several hospital staff members, and she approached the doctor who, she was told, had been in charge of her daughter’s treatment, and he very insensitively told my mother that my sister had passed away and that she must go home and tell my father they need to pay the Chevrah Kadisha at Haifa for the funeral, and that everything was taken care of. When she asked to see her the doctor told her, impossible, she has already been taken to Chevrah Kadisha... When my father went to Chevrah Kadisha and asked for the body he was told that they had already taken care of it. When he insisted that he bury her himself, he was reprimanded by the Chevrah Kadisha representative, who told him that he is not in Iraq with the Muslims, but in the land of Israel, where all are Jews and everyone takes care of one another.

Believing that he had no reason to doubt the "Jewish solidarity" and "support of your people" my father concluded that they had all spoken the truth. But towards the end of the Sixties my parents received a draft order in my sister’s name. Innocently, my parents thought it was a honest mistake and my father arrived at the Haifa draft office and suggested that a mistake had been made. They apologized for the "mistake" and my father went home. However, three months after that, my parents received another notification for my sister, stating that she had not presented herself for her draft examination, and again my father came to the draft office and held that his daughter had died. I don’t think my parents had a birth certificate that had been preserved, or a death certificate. But in 1985, one of my brothers, Shimon Dov, went to the Rambam Hospital archives and found a pink-colored slip in the file, that said that my sister had died of unclear reasons. But then, when my brother approached Chevrah Kadisha, he found in their register that my sister was supposedly buried 7 days after her supposed death, contrary to what my father had been told the day after her arrival at the hospital, that she had already been buried. Both my parents passed away in the past two years. A year and five days after Tzippora, my brother Ze'ev was born. Ze’ev was born with mental retardation and many severe medical problems. My parents took care of him until he was fifty three years old and then on account of the difficulties of his daily care and due their old age they had to move him to sheltered housing in Kiryat Haim. Ze'ev lived there until he was fifty-seven and then died due to complications in his internal organs. My parents lost another child. My parents had four more children in the following order: Avner in 1954, Esther in 1956, Shimon in 1957 and I, Ya'akov (Jacob), in 1960. My mother passed away in May 2014 and my father this last February, 2016.

My father stood before a government committee, I believe it was in 1997-1998, and there my father testified about all that had happened that July of 1952 and additionally about the draft orders that my parents had received for my sister in the late Sixties. All I remember from that meeting between my father and the judge is that the latter reprimanded my father for giving up his daughter. My father told the judge in response: "I was a new immigrant, my wife and I barely spoke Hebrew... We had reached the promised land, a country where most everyone was a Jew, and I believed every Jew."