I remember the image of my sister, Reena, vaguely. The image might have disappeared completely if it were not for the things that popped up and made us sharpen the memory and reexamine the issue. When all this happened, we were children. We did not investigate and we did not inquire. When such heavy topics came up, we did what we were asked to do. Today the issue has become a matter of principle, and the desire to know the truth became like fire burning in our bones.

We arrived in Israel in December from the island of Djerba, which is in Tunisia, near the end of 1954. We were twelve people (including grandpa and grandma) with the baby, Reena, who was one and a half years old, and we were sent to the transit camp (ma’abara) of Qaqun fnear Hadera. Two months after our immigration to Israel, Reena had a cold and Mother took her to the doctor at the clinic in Kibbutz HaMa'apil. From there it seems that she was taken to the hospital Hillel Yaffe. Reena’s mother was asked to leave her until she recovers. Mother returned to the transit camp, but when she came back the next day to visit her in the hospital, she was told that the baby had died. Mother, a new immigrant who did not understand Hebrew well, accepted the cruel fate with bitter cries and returned to the transit camp and told my father when he returned from work in Kibbutz HaMa’apil at the end of the day. My father took it in with shock, he wanted to investigate, to understand, and to see – how she turned from a baby with a cold when he left that morning to a baby that passed away the next day in the hospital. The issue bothered him and he wanted to see the baby for the last time. He was told that the baby was sent to Abu Kabir, a forensic research laboratory, without bothering to notify and return her to her parents so that they could bury her according to the Jewish faith. My father rode busses from the transit camp to Abu Kabir where he was shown a baby who had been thoroughly cut up “to examine the cause of death.” This image was difficult for many parents and especially my father, for whom family was everything.

In order to understand what he went through, one must enter the same world that my father and mother came from. May parents came from a place where they enjoyed the best, both financially and socially. Father was independent. He owned a carpentry shop, and was widely respected by all social classes. They came from a very religious family (my mother’s brother was the chief rabbi of Djerba), who would never have agreed to performing such autopsies and surely not on a one-year-old baby. They gave up everything for the dream of “next year in Jerusalem.” They accepted the fact that they were sent to a shack (or tent, I don’t remember) in the transit camp. They accepted that fact that Father became a worker in Kibbutz HaMa’apil which served pork in the dining hall. He used to have to bring with him a sandwich with margarine to avoid touching the non-kosher food of the kibbutz. All of this he was willing to accept for the love of the land, but to dissect a baby to shreds without the request or consent of the parents in the name of “the advancement of research” – that broke him. In my father’s perspective one must be inhuman to do such a thing. But he internalized all this pain. He didn’t share it with his young children or with his wife. It pained him that he was tempted by the Zionists who encouraged the Jews to immigrate to “the land of milk and honey”, and that he led his family through this tormenting journey. In those moments when it happened, he wanted to go back to France, but after long conversations with the clerks of the Jewish Agency, who explained to him that it was done “in the name of science”, and after considering the implications of returning with ten people and with nothing, he gave up on the idea. His pain and misgivings he took to his grave, and to this day we can only imagine what he felt in his heart.

A year or two later (around 1956-7,) Mother told about a strange encounter that happened to her in the doctor’s office in Netanya (to which we moved after the transit camp in Qaqun) where she met a nurse who was new to the office, and whom she knew from the clinic in the transit camp. The nurse told her that she has a secret to tell her concerning her daughter, Reena, and that she is busy today, but if she came the day after she would make time to tell her. Mother went the next day and the nurse disappeared and never came again. Mother treated it as nothing but a strange story, and it was forgotten.

Father almost managed To make us forget what he had gone through. Until one day, after Father had passed (in 1978), Mother gathered us and told us about a strange dream she had dreamed. Father appears in the dream and tells Mother, “Reena did not die. She is alive. Look for her.” Mother said that it was probably real, and asked us just to check if she needed us. But if she’s doing well, then to not interrupt her in her new life. The last thing we wanted was to cause her, God forbid, unnecessary shock. With such a strange request, we didn’t know where to start. Miriam, my sister, who, because of her job had access, started looking in the the civil registry by Reena’s ID number (at the time ID numbers were consecutive). One day the phone rings at work, and my sister Miriam sounds terrified. “There is one Reena with an identical ID number, married with two children.” We meet, flustered from the news, and we don’t know what to do. The whole story about “the children of Yemen” started to be personal, and we started feeling very hurt. With the help of a friend Benny Sharabi from Marmorek, I managed to track the doctor that then treated Reena’s case and we met him, today he is a respected professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Professor Reitman passed away a number of years ago). He oif course didn’t remember anything and didn’t want to remember that period, which he characterized as “dark.” When we asked why “dark,” he clarified that there were a lot of patients and there were no means of caring for them. He sent us to the only place that in his opinion there was information: Abu Kabir. I went to Abu Kabir to read the autopsy report. I was shown a hand written report about a baby named Reena that got there and was operated on post-mortem. Miriam, my sister, for her part, tried to find out how it is possible that my deceased sister is listed as being married with two children. In the office they said that there was a mistake and the name was just deleted from the census.

We returned to square one without an option to advance.

Near the end of the 1990s we read an article in the newspaper by an author who said he was born in Tunis, immigrated in 1954, and was taken to adoptive parents. And his adoptive father, when he reached the age of 70 confessed in front of him that he is not his real father and he was taken from his parents without their knowledge in 1954. This reignited the memories and the hopes.

But we never had a lead and I decided at least to commit the event to the family’s memory through a book I wrote called My Father’s House. In the meantime, on February 4, 2007, my mother also passed away.

Yehuda Halfon

Levana Periante