Shlomit Ben Ari, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel from France in 1949, worked between 1953-55 as a nurse in the children's department of Rambam Hospital.
She contacted the Amram Association in early 2022 through a colleague, and gave her testimony, regarding the conduct of the hospital in relation to children who arrived from the transit camps.
In her testimony, Ben Ari stated that the registration at the reception of the children was defective, and as a result it was impossible to maintain contact between the parents and the children: "There was no organized reception system, I was not told to ask for identity cards. I asked verbally what the name was, and wrote down what I heard, usually only a first name or a family name. I would hang a handwritten note above the baby's bed. There were times I didn't hear the name correctly, because of the accent. I wrote what I understood, there were definitely mistakes."
Following this, Ben Ari testifies that when the children recovered, the hospital did not know where to return them, so they were sent to a foster care institution: "When the healthy child had to be released, but they did not know where his parents were. He was taken to a foster care home on Shabtai Levi Street, where they took care of them. We didn't know who to call, and we couldn't wait for the parents to come back."
In Ben Ari's estimation, during her work in the department, there were dozens of cases, in which children were sent healthy to foster care in Haifa, following their disconnection from their parents.
As we all remember, the Ministry of Health, recently forwarded the draft report, submitted by Prof. Itamar Grotto and Dr. Shlomit Avni, regarding the involvement of medical teams in the case, for the opinion of Prof. Shifra Shvarts. In her opinion Shvarts claimed, that children who recovered, were sent back to their families.
Ben Ari's testimony contradicts this statement, and clarifies, that at a fairly late stage of the affair, between the years 1953-55, healthy children were sent to foster care, without a record that would allow their parents to be identified.
The quotes are from an article published in Yedioth Ahronoth and on the Ynet website. To read the article in full[Hebrew]:
There was no organized reception system, I was not told to ask for identity cards. I asked verbally what the name was, and wrote down what I heard, usually only a first name or a family name. I would hang a handwritten note above the baby's bed. There were times I didn't hear the name correctly, because of the accent. I wrote what I understood, there were definitely mistakes.