From 1948 until 1954 in Israel, several thousand babies and toddlers were taken from their parents and disappeared.
Two thirds of them were from Yemeni families after 49,000 Jews had been airlifted from one of the Arab world’s poorest countries to the new Jewish state.
Their parents were told their children had died but came to believe they had been abducted by the Israeli authorities and illegally put up for adoption to childless Jews of European descent. However, three commissions set up by the Israeli government between 1967 and 1995 dismissed allegations of nationwide kidnappings.
In what it calls a “documentary protest performance”, the Jaffa-based Frechot Ensemble gives vent to decades of suppressed anger and frustration in a superbly choreographed, poignant production.
The play is based on a poem by the Israeli writer Iris Eliya Cohen, in which giving birth is likened to a battle, and on the testimonies of women, some of which were found in the Israeli state archives. One of the three actresses, Moria Beshari-Liphshitz, 38, heard the stories from her grandmother, Sara Beshari, whose daughter Yedida disappeared, aged five. This connection serves to super-charge the already heady emotion felt by the tightly knit trio of Sephardi Jewish actresses, who include the excellent Selly Arkadash and Eden Uliel, all of whom are mothers.
There’s a Kafkaesque feeling to the production in which the three black-dressed pregnant women, at times talking in unison, descend from nervous chitter-chatter as they put on their light blue hospital tunics into anguished figures splayed out on their backs on multi-purpose exercise balls, wailing and praying to the skies in a language that is foreign to the unseen doctors and nurses in whom they trusted as it is to the audience.
As the contractions start, hallucinatory sequences played out amid a throbbing soundtrack, accentuated by a screeching cello, segue into sobs as they walk around clutching white cloths with the Hebrew names of their missing children embroidered onto them, seeking to know what has happened to them. They jabber away until their voices become whispers and then silence in a gut-wrenching scene as the lights dim.
The committees of inquiry scene is brilliantly sardonic before the exercise balls return, this time above the trio’s heads. The families of 648 babies and toddlers who disappeared filed claims to the state, we are told, with the term “chance adoption handovers” left hanging in the air. Powerfully directed by Hana Vazana-Grunwald and choreographed by Shira Eviatar, it makes for a searingly intense theatrical experience.
