My parents, Naama Naomi and Yahya Salem Gerafi, came from Yemen in the big 1948 immigration. My parents came with three small children; the eldest girl was just ten years old.

They were sent to the transit camp in Yavniel, and they worked there in every job they were required to do, including road construction and agriculture. My mother gave birth to her son, Shlomo, at home, and afterwards they were taken to Poriya Hospital, where my father was asked to donate blood for the baby. He did so, and my parents were asked to leave the baby there for observation. The baby was left in Poriya on Friday. When the Sabbath ended my elder sister, Sarah, went to the public phone to call the Hospital about the baby, and she was told he had died. She returned to my parents, shocked and sad, and told them. On Sunday morning, my father went to the hospital and asked for the body to bury it. He has been told that they'd taken care of everything. My father believed them because the baby hadn’t even been circumcised. My parents, who believed they just arrived in the holy Land of Israel, couldn't even contemplate that they had fallen prey to such a dark scheme.

After a year, stories were being told in the area about children being abducted and my parents became very afraid. When my brother, Oded, was about three years old, he fell sick, and when my mother took him to hospital they asked her to leave him there for observation. This time, my mother feared that he was going to be taken from her as well, and we she was left alone with him, she wrapped my brother in a sheet, jumped from the second floor and escaped. My mother couldn't stop thinking about her son which was probably taken from her until the day she died. From there my parents moved to Ramat HaSharon until the day they passed.

My mother was asked by her grandchildren many times to come to their school and she always told the same story, about the children that was taken from her, and about her escape from the Poriya Hospital, a proper "family story.” Today, we, her children, are already more than sixty years old. We want to know the sad truth.

Orit Gerafi Hopfengarten