The stories that a nation tells itself, its mythology, bear a fascinating and often telling

relationship to a nation's history.

History is like a photograph, capturing snapshots, precisely rendered of what actually

happened. Mythology is portraiture. Painting figures that bear some resemblance to reality,

but that are exaggerated and posed and composed and set in ways that perhaps never happened,

but that nevertheless illuminate something that might

have. A national myth can be elevating and can nourish and replenish the essential virtues of a society,

or a national myth can portray and channel something darker. Some impurity rooted perhaps in something real that then metastasized

and took on a life of its own. Today, we'll look at that latter sort of national myth,

a very ugly incident in the early history of Israel that is taken as true and even dimly

recollected by some number of Israelis and that as has been

demonstrated over and over never took place. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host,

Jonathan Silver. The myth I am referring to concerns the large scale immigration of Middle

Eastern Jews into the state of Israel in the early 1950s,

and in particular the influx of Jews from Yemen. About them, a truly horrible story is widely

believed. It is believed, by some at least, that hundreds of children were taken from these

Jewish Yemenite families, families who had

just arrived to take residence and refuge in the new state of Israel, that hundreds of children

were taken by government officials and, without consent, placed for adoption in the homes of

Eastern European Ashkenazi Israelis.

This, it goes without saying, would be a grave injustice if it were true.

And it is indeed believed to be true by some Israelis.

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