Shoshana (Shamaa) Zioni, immigrated with her mother, Yona Arusi, from Yemen. The mother gave birth to the son in the British Hospital in Aden. He was one month old when they arrived in Ein Shemer. The child was under supervision at the infant nursery, like all babies.
The mother would arrive every few hours to breastfeed. One day, when the grandfather arrived from the Rosh Ayin transit camp and asked to perform a circumcision, the mother came to the nursery and specifically asked to prepare the baby and dress him nicely, because the next day they wanted to circumcise him.
When she arrived in the morning to take him to perform the circumcision, she was told that he had passed away. The mother tried to argue, but they told her that he had been transferred to Pardes Hana. She went there, and was told that he was not there and perhaps he is in Rambam in Haifa.
When my father, the late Shalom Arusi, came to Israel (he did not arrive with my mother), he tried to argue and clarify exactly what had transpired. Yitzchak Aricha told him that he should believe the doctors and listen to them and not to argue, because they know what they are talking about.
Shoshana's brother angrily recalled that he was a child during the era of the 1968 committee investigation, when investigators came to their home to find out if mother was lying.
All her life, nothing interested my mother – every morning and every evening she would mention him, until the day she died. She always said he was alive and that one day he would return. She always kept asking to go and look for him.
The house was not a happy one, we grew up in the shadow of the argument between mother and father about who was responsible for the child's disappearance and whose fault it was that he was kidnapped. Every Friday night my mother would cry during Kiddush.
The house was not a happy one, we grew up in the shadow of the argument between mother and father about who was responsible for the child's disappearance and whose fault it was that he was kidnapped.