
The Israeli Knesset has, after sixty years of cover-up, exposed one of the most lurid scandals in the history of Israeli medicine. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, inspired by Ben Gurion’s philosophy that Israel must populate itself via Jewish immigration to compete with the Arabs, Israel airlifted tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews and resettled them. It was celebrated as a great humanitarian operation in which the Yemenites were “saved” from a life of destitution and anti-Semitic victimhood in their native land.
Within months of their arrival, reports began circulating of babies who disappeared from hospitals and medical clinics. The final count amounted to hundreds, perhaps even thousands of babies who were purportedly kidnapped from their parents or even killed. The grieving parents received no word about what had happened; no death certificate; no explanation. Even decades later, after three separate boards of inquiry spanning thirty years, the results of the investigations were sealed and victims learned nothing. The State refused to accept responsibility nor did it compensate the victims for their personal losses. It is perhaps the greatest medical scandal in Israeli history, ranking right up there with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in its deviousness and lethality.
Israel HaYom, which first broke the story, sought comment from an NIH spokesperson who responded that it could not release information without a FOIA request. I am exploring doing so now. It’s extremely important to expose whatever role U.S. doctors or researchers played in this disaster.
Living children were also used in anatomy demonstrations in which parts of their bodies were outlined in ink with the names of various organs. Presumably, this was meant to serve as a live demonstration for students who could see where the organs were located on a living body.
In none of these experiments were the parents of the children asked for permission. Researchers simply used the Yemenites, living or dead, for the benefit of medicine, which was deemed more critical than the feelings of the mourning parents.
The new report explains why so many Yemenite children died: since none of the Israeli medical staff spoke Yemenite and the patients didn’t speak Hebrew, staff could not learn the names of the children. Instead, they numbered them. The numbering system often broke down and patients’ numbers were often switched, misplaced or lost, which led to the wrong medicines being taken and wrong treatments offered. As a result many died. The medical staff decided that it should make the best of the opportunity by whisking the bodies off for autopsies or post-mortem experimentation.

One of the most ghoulish reports concerns four babies who were hospitalized because they were malnourished. Though they were in stable condition, doctors decided to inject them with “dry protein.” In the ‘understated’ words of the chief of staff of the Rosh HaAyin hospital:
Mendel said, “I remember one or two cases in which Dr. Matot gave instructions to give an injection of dry protein that we would separate. Serum, dry plasma … and the results were not good.”
The protocol includes a letter from Dr. Kalman Jacob Mann, deputy medical director of the hospital, to Mendel, dated Nov. 21, 1949, saying: “I visited our hospital in Rosh Haayin, and found that that morning four babies who had received active treatment had died. These babies were in more or less balanced condition according to their physio-pathological condition, but after they were injected with various solutions, the balance was upset and they died.”
The Likud MK leading the current investigation called such acts “murder.”
In further testimony, the lawyer on behalf of the board of inquiry questioned Dr. Mendel about the practice of using dead fetuses for experimentation:
When Nahmani-Roth [the lawyer] asked him whether the unapproved autopsies had caused problems with the parents who wanted to see their children’s bodies, Mendel replied, “I don’t think so, since after the autopsies we’d fix up the baby, so they [the parents] could see its face, so it looked undamaged … but it was completely legal. There were no problems.”
The lawyer shot back: “Not legally, but morally, and out of a sense of the parents’ feelings. Isn’t it possible that consistently, you would conduct autopsies on children and then not show the bodies to their parents?”
Mendel also told the committee that all the testing had been meticulously documented, but that he had heard rumors that “someone destroyed them [the records] seven years later.”
In a number of cases, medical staff simply adopted babies as their own. The parents, again, were never told a thing other than that the baby had died. The tragedy in this case is not just that of the parents, but of the children raised by Ashkenazi parents who could or would never tell them how they came to be their parents. Many of these children grew up to sense they were victims of this disastrous experiment. But the State offered them nothing, which made things even worse.
A corollary to this tragedy is the Ringworm Affair, in which Israeli doctors treated Yemenite children with radiation against ringworm. They did so without realizing at the time that the dosage they were giving the children was toxic, even lethal, and would later cause cancer in many of them. The State similarly denied any culpability for this disastrous medical treatment.
In this age of roaring hate, it’s important to put this story in proper perspective. There are those who will attempt to compare these experiments with Nazi medical experiments on Jewish children and adults. There will always be those who seek to prove that Israelis are no different from Nazis. That’s why it’s important to note that such outrageous medical practices happened around the world including here in the U.S. They were the result certainly of racism and heartlessness. But the Israeli experiments, while immoral, were not conducted within a framework of genocide as the Nazi ones were.
However, that in no way lessens the horror of what Israeli medicine did. It in no way lessens Israeli government culpability for these crimes. As the MK leading this inquiry noted: this was outright murder. The fact that Israel has suppressed this story for as long as it has is a dark stain on the nation. It is yet another reminder of the profound racism at the heart of the Zionist enterprise. At the very beginning of the State, Yemenite babies were treated as the equivalent of cannon fodder. Alive, they were meant to fill in the population gaps of Israeli Jews in the demographic battle against the Arabs. Dead, they were used for the “good” of medical science. Israel’s doctors and politicians treated the Yemenites as disposable, interchangeable objects to be manipulated for the good of the State.
” Israel airlifted hundreds of thousands of Yemenite Jews and resettled them. ”
גוזמא it was circa 40,000.
Please show source for all the sources I have seen correspond to circa 40,000.
Aside from that there probably are not even close to 100,000 Yemenites in Israel today.
@ shaul: This error had already been corrected by the time you posted your comment. Sometimes, unless I empty my site’s cache, you’ll be seeing an earlier version of the post than the most recent one (post-corrections).
Wikipedia says the actual numbers are 50,000 immigrated via Operation Magic Carpet. And 400,000 Yemenite Jews currently living in Israel. That’s quite a discrepancy with your claim.
“A corollary to this tragedy is the Ringworm Affair, in which Israeli doctors treated Yemenite children with radiation against ringworm.”
It was mostly Moroccans and many died.
In the US the situation was not entirely diff because in the ’50’s they had no cure for ringworm and thus bombarded ringworm affected people with X-rays. After all if you can’t see what harm can it do?
I myself picked up ringworm from a summer camp seeing that it is very contagious and my parents took me to an upper-class skin doctor who covered my body up to the neck with lead and bombarded my head with X-rays thinking my hair would fall out and eliminate the ringworm and then grow back. Never happened. We went to another doctor who said it would disappear with puberty and it did.
At the age of about 30 I developed Hypothyroidism which I always attributed to the X-rays but it is not provable.
Today they have a salve that you apply for one week and presto it is gone.
Many did not fair as well as I and got tumors and the like.
So like it says in the Talmud “the best of the drs are in hell”.
They gave the Moroccan children 35,000 times the maximum dose of radiation. Even after thousands died, they continued radiating them. This was all for money Israel received from the United States. By the way, Haim Sheba who was responsible and went to America to bring the machines has a hospital named after him, Sheba Hospital. Isn’t that ironic that we named a hospital after a monster? Shame on us!
that’s just so wrong
But how established are these claims? In fact, the Yisrael Hayom article doesn’t even mention any biomedical experiments conducted on children. Its strongest accusation is that the doctors applied an “experimental treatment” to severe malnutrition and that four babies died. Nobody says how crazy it was, given knowledge available, to give this treatment. Nobody says what was the condition of the patients. Most importantly, nobody says how many kids in a similar condition got the treatment and recovered as a result. It may have been cruel experimentation, but even the article’s description sounds much more like doctors applying a not-fully standard treatment which failed to save the lives of four individuals. This happens every day.
All other claims are even less clear. There’s no information on the children in the picture. They are clearly very ill. Perhaps the marking on their body was a of the treatment process? There is not a shred of evidence that they were used to teach anyone anything. On what are these claims based?
The sickle-cell anemia is another storm in a teacup. In practice, all they tested was whether Yemenits were carrying the disease which is very common among sub-Saharan Africans. This is a simple blood test followed by examination under a microscope. A single doctor describing it might sound bad in today’s standards, but all that it was was a barely-invasive study in population genetics. Today nobody’s allowed to do this without consent, but this should not be taken out of proportions.
And finally, whatever they did with corpses is wrong. It’s good that nobody treats dead people and their family members that way anymore. But again, these are dead people. Disrespectful? Yes. But not completely weird at the time and, in the end of the day, nothing as bad as the claims made in the headline of the article.
@ Bibino:
Not true at all. The articles mention medical experiments and testing on corpses from age 4 months to 42 years. How did you miss that? Plus 4 babies were injected with dry protein and died. That is a medical experiment. How did you miss that as well?
Gee, let’s see how crazy it was. You inject a substance into a living person w/o any knowledge of what it’s effect will be. And you not only do it once and the patient dies. You do it four times. And you do this experiment of child whose medical condition is stable at the time. That’s a clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath and grounds for revocation of medical license at least.
Wrong. And you clearly haven’t read the post I wrote. A cardinal rule for participating in the comment threads here: you read the entire article and ALL the links provided BEFORE you comment. Don’t waste my time otherwise till you do that.
Wrong again. It’s clear that once the 4 babies died they didn’t go further with the experiment. How many have to die before you decide the experiment failed???
NOnsense. This was a botched experiment undertaken without ethnical awareness or approval of the parents. It’s akin to murder if not negligent homicide.
Again, you clearly didn’t read the post or the links which clearly indicate that they were used as a teaching tool. READ the FRIGGIN’ LINKS!
Again nonsense. They had no authorization to test anything on anyone. And they were clearly attempting to prove that Yemenite origin was in Africa and the linked article clearly indicate the attempt to prove this failed when a British researcher showed this was the case. And they performed the blood tests on dead bodies to boot!!
The entire thing was weird and racist. No, it wasn’t the only weird racist medical experiment of the day. But that doesn’t diminish the horror of this by a single iota despite your feeble hasbara attempts.
You have made your contribution to this thread. You may comment in other threads, but no longer in this one. I find your effort here to be distasteful and disrespectful to the YEmenite victims.
Although ‘diagnosing at a distance’ is frowned upon, the appearance of the children in these photos is compatible with the disease ‘Kwashiorkor’ (severe protein-calorie) malnutrition [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor]). Rather than being subjected to human experimentation, they should have been patients in the hospitals exploiting them. Using them as human guinea pigs would make Dr, Mengele proud!
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It’s called “Eugenics”,and was a very common science in Israel,GB ,US and Germany in those years,and still is but now world wide and more subtle.
You banned me various times for mentioning the fate of The Yemeni Children,The Ringworm Affair ,Depo Provera on Etiopian Jews and other Eugenics activities in Israel.
Many things I mentioned on this site have caused you to ban me,eventhough most of these facts turned out to be true,you just didn’t know it yet..
It’s the main reason why I refrain from commenting here.
The rabbithole is much deeper and more widespread than you are able to grab.
Still, I enjoy reading your articles.
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