My brother Asher disappeared from Tel Hashomer Hospital one day after he was admitted there by my mother. She took him there because he had respiratory difficulties. She came back to see him and she was told that he had died. This all happened right after my parents immigrated to Israel. They gave her a bundle of clothes. “These are his clothes,” they told her. “He’s dead. Take the clothes and leave,” they told her.

A year later I was born and I was named after the “deceased” boy. This did not stop authorities from summoning him to school and to the army, nor from sending notifications concerning his civic duties, such as elections and so on. In 1981 I tried to check with the Ministry of Internal Affairs what happened to him using his ID number. I was given a paper saying that “the citizen has lost contact with the authorities,” and that’s it. There was no death certificate, or details about his death. There was a death certificate from Tel Hashomer Hospital and the details of a grave from Chevra Kadisha [the Jewish burial society], but it wasn’t recorded by the authorities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Yesterday (May 30, 2016) I gathered my strength and went to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and inquired about him again using his ID number. In the ministry’s computer there are no details about his address in the last few decades, and there is no mention of a death. It only says “last known address is Ma’abarat Skiya B [immigrant’s absorption camp] and “citizen was deleted from the records.” I asked how this was possible and was told that whoever was not counted in the census of 1962 is recorded as such.

That means that his record was retroactively updated to 1962, since he was defined as having “lost contact with the authorities” in 1981.

That goes to show that there are many authorities involved and that are continuing to try to conceal the disappearance of babies back then.