page_title: Yemenite Children Affair
section_title: Context
hierarchical_section_title: Yemenite Children Affair / Context
caption_attribution_description: English: JEWISH AGENCY REPRESENTATIVES MEETING YEMENITE IMMIGRANTS, UPON ARRIVAL AT THE LOD AIRPORT. עברית: נציגי הסוכנות היהודית פוגשים בעולים מתימן עם הגעתם לשדה התעופה לוד.
context_page_description: The Yemenite Children Affair refers to the disappearance of between 1,500 and 5,000 babies and toddlers of new immigrants to the newly founded state of Israel from 1948 to 1954. The majority of immigrants arriving in Israel during this period were from Yemen, with considerable numbers coming from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia and the Balkans. According to low estimates, one in eight children of Yemenite families disappeared. Hundreds of documented statements made over the years by the parents of these infants allege that their children were removed from them. There have been allegations that no death certificates were issued, and that parents did not receive any information from Israeli and Jewish organizations as to what had happened to their infants. However, Yaacov Lozowick, Chief Archivist at the Israel State Archives, has documented records showing that while the fate of a small fraction of the "missing" children cannot be traced, in the overwhelming majority of cases the children died in hospital, were buried, and the families notified, although these illnesses, deaths, and family notifications were handled with enormous insensitivity.
context_section_description: The Yemenite community was well established in Ottoman and then British Mandate Palestine by the turn of the century. The State of Israel was created in 1948 and almost immediately began to receive refugees who included both several hundred thousand Holocaust survivors and Jews who had become refugees as a result of the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, which resulted in about 700,000 new immigrants from the Muslim world.
  Consequently, the population of Israel rose from 800,000 to two million between 1948 and 1958. During this period, food, clothes, and furniture had to be rationed in what became known as the Austerity Period. Between 1948–1970, approximately 1,151,029 Jewish refugees relocated to Israel. Many arrived as penniless refugees and were housed in temporary camps known as ma'abarot; by 1952, over 200,000 immigrants were living in these tent cities.
  Roughly 50,000 Yemenite Jews were brought to Israel in Operation On Wings of Eagles through a temporary camp in Aden.
caption: Jewish Agency representatives meeting Yemenite immigrants, upon arrival at Lod airport 1949
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