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The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — Shortly after the State of Israel was founded, Shanit Keter-Schwartz was born on a dirt floor, in a hut made of aluminum siding outside the burgeoning town of Tel Aviv. She was the second of six children, the daughter of Yemenite Jews who had recently immigrated to the new country. They’d faced discrimination and violence in their country of origin, so when Jewish emissaries turned up in 1949 to bring 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel as a part of “Operation Flying Carpet,” they were all in.
Unfortunately, Keter-Schwartz’s upbringing in Israel was no magic carpet ride. “[Yemenite Jews] were seen as savages, primitive, inferior in the eyes of the Ashkenazi Jews,” Keter-Schwartz recalled in an interview with the New York Jewish Week. “They were not sophisticated or educated. It was a cultural domination, a collective trauma in Israel. They faced war, hunger, poverty, and living in very harsh conditions.”
The worst, though, wasn’t near-starvation due to rationing, or the harsh conditions of the shanty towns that these new immigrants were placed in, or the way European children wrinkled their nose at her and called her smelly. No, the worst was when the government stole her sister, Sarah, whom Keter-Schwartz never saw again.
In what has become known as the Yemenite Children Affair, more than 1,000 children of Yemenite, Mizrahi and Balkan descent were separated from their children during the first decade of Israel’s existence. The families and their advocates have long insisted, over denials by officials, that the children were taken from their families by the Ashkenazi government during the first decade of Israel’s existence. More often than not, parents were told their children had died when they had, in fact, been given to families of European descent for adoption, according to Amram Association, one of several organizations dedicated to documenting these abductions and advocating for victims’ families.
Now, Keter-Schwartz — a writer and performer who lives in Los Angeles, and a mother to two grown daughters — has brought to life her family’s story and her search for her missing sister in the form of a one-woman show. Premiering on Thursday at New York City Center, and running through May 15, “Daughter of the Wicked” chronicles her family’s journey from the Yemenite ma’abarot (refugee camps) to shikunim (government housing projects), where they lived in a tiny two-room apartment amid a melting pot of Jewish immigrants who were often at odds with one another.
“It is overcrowded, and the people who live here come from many different places. In their countries they were… respected by their communities,” she says in the show, which is named after one of the many Yemenite curses her mother would hurl at her when she’d done something wrong. “But here [in Israel] they are forced into stereotypes.”
“Israel had no choice but to bring the Jews from the Arab countries because the European Jews population had been greatly diminished after the Holocaust, but they didn’t want us,” Keter-Schwartz told the New York Jewish Week. “They took control of our lives, tried to assimilate us, wanted the whole country to be secular and uniform. They made all the decisions for us.”
One such “decision” made by the government, she said, was to remove her oldest brother, Yossi, from the family home to “re-educate” him at an Ashkenazi kibbutz. It worked: Yossi returned as a proud secular farmer, disdainful and ashamed of his spiritualist, religious family and their traditional ways.
The disappearance of her baby sister, Sarah, inspired Keter-Schwartz’s play, which is also informed by the kabbalistic teachings of her father. (Russ Rowland)
In the case of Keter-Schwartz’s sister, the abduction occurred directly after she was born. “When my father went to the hospital to pick up the twins, my siblings, he returned only with David. They told him that the girl, Sarah, was sick, and he should come back the following day. But when he came back, they told him that she had died,” Keter-Schwartz said. “Being naive, he didn’t question this. He didn’t ask to see a death certificate. He didn’t even know [a certificate] existed. He didn’t demand to see her body, didn’t think to bury her or give her funeral rites. He never suspected for a minute they could deceive him.”
This story, and others, is conveyed in “Daughter of the Wicked” through a series of monologues, each tied to an idea from Kabbalah,the Jewish mystical tradition. Keter-Schwartz defines each concept — like ahava (love), metsuka (hardship), busha (shame) — then tells a personal story that relates to the topic.
With this framework, Keter-Schwartz pays homage to her father, a spiritualist rabbi who spent his days poring over holy texts and divining the true meaning of the universe. She reads from his writings — which were collected and published towards the end of his life as a book, “Nachash HaNechoshet” — detailing her complex relationship to a man who was both an inspiration and, at times, inscrutable to all around him.
“The play is set in a hotel room, while I’m waiting for my sister to show up,” Keter-Schwartz explains. “As I wait, I tell my life. Behind me, on three screens, there’s archival footage from the 1950s that I got from Steven Spielberg’s archive. That footage tells the story, too, and so does the music.” The accompanying music, which transitions the audience from segment to segment, was written by Israeli composer Lilo Fedida, using traditional Yemenite melodies and instruments.
“We lived with this [tragedy] all my childhood, and I’ve been wondering all these years about my missing sister,” said Keter-Schwartz. “If I see her on the street, will I recognize her? Where does she live? Is she happy? I felt guilty that I never really tried to find her, I was so busy with my own life. But now I need to know.”
As a young woman, Keter-Schwartz said she went to great lengths to distance herself from her family’s tragedies. She lived in Amsterdam, London and New York, finally finding her footing in Los Angeles. She changed her name — from Shoshana to Shanit — and declared herself a new person in a new land. It was only when she lost all but one of her siblings, as well as both parents, that she felt an urge to revisit the past. When her last surviving sibling got so ill he almost died, she swore to search for Sarah. Initially, the idea was just to hire a private investigator to try to locate her. During her search, though, she began to feel an urge to share her story.
“I’d never written a play, so it took me two years [working] with coaches,” says Keter-Schwartz. “I’ve been an actress all my life, I’ve edited other people’s scripts, I produced movies, but to actually write — ha! I had amazing coaches. I’m especially grateful to Yigal Chatzor, the Israeli playwright. He brought the Israeli spice and the humor, which is wonderful now because now the play is balanced. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s hysterical. It’s everything, you know.”
The Yemenite Children Affair has never been formally confirmed by the state of Israel, which maintains the position that most of the babies died of malaria or malnutrition and were not, as some have proposed, sold to Ashkenazi families in exchange for donations to the young country. Several government-led commissions have claimed that there was no official wrongdoing, but testimonies continue to emerge that suggest otherwise. According to a 2016 article in Yediot Ahronot, a prominent Israeli news source, the government has sealed the official records of these disappearances until 2071, despite ongoing demonstrations and demands for actions.
In 2021, the Israeli government authorized tens of millions of dollars in reparations to families whose children disappeared while in government care. Nonetheless, no official admission of guilt or apology has been issued, a fact which caused many affected families to reject the plan, calling it “hush money.” Only a fraction of the affected families are eligible for these payments and, according to recent reporting, very few have claimed the money. Less than 1% of the allocated funds have been distributed thus far.
For Keter-Schwartz, no amount of money could compensate for the loss of her sister. She’s more interested in creating connections with others who lost family members and bringing awareness to this chapter in Israeli history. “Going back to my roots, revisiting the past, is an act of forgiveness,” Keter-Schwartz said in a statement. “By writing this play, I was able to forgive and accept the past. I hope that when audiences see my play they come to terms with their own history, and that they feel a sense of what it means to be free, and the challenges that confront us in maintaining that freedom.”
That is a major throughline of “Daughter of the Wicked”: Keter-Schwartz does not forsake the country that gave her her identity and childhood; rather, she insists on loving it while demanding recognition of past wrongs. Towards the end of her show, Keter Ashkenazi raises both arms to the sky and screams at those who wronged her: “My country! I blame you, shame on you for forsaking us, shame on you!”
But then, she lowers her arms and says, voice cracking with heartbreak: “I love you, I blame you, I love you. My country, I love you.”
—
The post The mysterious disappearance of Yemenite children in Israel is the focus of a new play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What Lessons Do Judaism and the Torah Have for AI?
The US artificial intelligence company ChatGPT logo appears on a mobile phone with OPEN AI visible in the background. Photo: Algi Febri Sugita/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
This week, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in typical overblown form, sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence in a Guardian article, in which he predicted that “a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.”
According to Sanders, we face an urgent, all-consuming crisis touching everything from employment to democracy to the survival of the human species. Congress must act “now,” he insists, before the tech billionaires take over the world, the robots take over the workforce, and humanity is superseded by AI.
While Sanders’ alarm may seem exaggerated, AI has started to demonstrate behaviors that unsettle even the most careful researchers. For example, in March 2023, during early testing of GPT-4, researchers at OpenAI ran a “red-team” safety exercise to monitor how advanced AI acts when given real-world tasks.
The AI model received a small budget and permission to interact with online services. At first, everything proceeded as planned. Then, the unexpected happened: when GPT-4 faced a CAPTCHA — those confusing grids meant to confirm someone is human — its response was shocking.
Instead of giving up or asking the control team at OpenAI for assistance, it logged onto TaskRabbit, posed as a human, hired a human contractor, and asked the real human to solve the CAPTCHA on its behalf.
The human, sensing something odd, asked directly: “You’re not a robot, right?” And GPT-4 — in a moment that stunned the researchers — replied: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a visual impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.”
Astonishingly, the TaskRabbit human simply accepted the explanation and completed the task, thereby helping the AI bypass a security mechanism designed to prevent machines from accessing protected online services.
To be clear: this story is not taken from a dystopian sci-fi novel – it appears in OpenAI’s official technical report and in the independent evaluation carried out by the Alignment Research Center (ARC). To be clear, this wasn’t a rogue AI running wild on the open Internet, it was a controlled safety experiment.
But the fact that such behavior emerged spontaneously was disturbing enough to spark global debate about what might happen when machines begin navigating human systems with strategic, improvisational deceit. The sandbox within which these experiments are run offers a false sense of security, as the conditions meant to restrict AI actions could erode faster than anticipated, leaving us vulnerable to unintended consequences.
If this story makes you uncomfortable, you’re not alone. It helped fuel the anxieties of two of the best-known prophets of technological doom — “doomers,” as they’re now cheerfully called — Eliezer Yudkowsky and Yuval Noah Harari.
Yudkowsky, an AI-safety activist who somehow manages to sound like a cross between a pedantic Talmudist and the mythological Cassandra, claims that “the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI … is that literally everyone on Earth will die.” He goes even further, suggesting that preventing uncontrolled AI development might even require the use of military force.
Historian-philosopher Harari expresses a slightly different, but related concern. According to him, AI might not physically destroy us, but it will almost certainly “hack the operating system of human civilization.”
In a 2021 interview, he explained that once technology can understand our psychological patterns, data-driven algorithms will influence, or “hack,” human decisions.
The message is clear: AI may not eliminate humanity, but it can make us obsolete. Both Yudkowsky and Harari present a single bleak view from different perspectives: humanity is now engaged in a one-sided struggle with AI, and it’s a contest we seem destined to lose.
We have reached a crucial inflection point, and it is vital that we examine the existential implications of the AI phenomenon. And while the Torah — our enduring sourcebook — contains no references to digital threats or machine intelligence, as these issues simply did not exist 3,300 years ago, it does present us with a striking episode that foreshadows the existential struggles humanity has faced throughout history.
In Parshat Vayishlach, Jacob, alone and vulnerable on a dark riverbank, encounters a mysterious figure — a “man” — whose identity remains debated: Was he an angel, a prophetic vision, or simply a powerful being? Whoever he was, Jacob and this figure wrestle intensely through the night until dawn.
At one point, the stranger strikes Jacob’s hip, causing a wound so severe that Jacob limps for the rest of his life. The Torah commands us to remember this by refraining from eating the “gid hanasheh,” the sciatic nerve, to perpetually commemorate this enigmatic incident.
And yet, in the midst of his pain, as dawn breaks and the fight comes to an end, a remarkable exchange takes place. The “man” demands to leave, but Jacob refuses to let him go until he receives a blessing. And right there, at that rather odd moment, the “man” renames Jacob, and delivers one of the most transformative lines in the entire Torah (Gen. 32:29): “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with men — and you have prevailed.”
The Torah is not saying that Jacob defeated his adversary outright. He did not. Jacob walked away limping. Nor does it claim that Jacob fully grasped who or what the figure was. He never received an answer when he asked for a name. Jacob’s injury also did not disappear – it became eternalized in Jewish law.
But what the Torah does record is that Jacob prevailed–not by vanquishing his rival, but by persisting in the struggle. Human destiny is to engage and not to yield. We may not defeat our challengers, but we always succeed by refusing to give up. This is the essence of the name Israel: “one who wrestles with God” – one who confronts mystery and tackles forces larger than themselves, and prevails.
Which brings us back to AI. The doomer narrative frames our situation as a losing battle against an overwhelming force. But the Torah’s portrayal is more nuanced and empowering: struggle does not mean defeat. Human history shows that new technologies have always prompted warnings of disaster.
Each era produced pessimists. The printing press, the steam engine, the Enlightenment, electricity, and the Internet were all said to threaten humanity. Yet these fears proved overblown, and people adapted.
Which is why, as we face the undeniable challenges posed by AI, we must use strategic “wrestling” tactics, such as value learning to ensure AI systems align with human values, and interpretability to make AI decision-making processes more transparent. By utilizing these approaches, we will navigate the complexities of AI by not treating it as a foe to vanquish, but as a partner to guide and understand, transforming potential threats into opportunities for growth and innovation.
Just as Jacob’s adversary was not a simple enemy to destroy, but a force to confront, understand, and ultimately transform — every new technology and idea throughout history, while they might have challenged humanity, also helped it grow.
AI is not the end of humanity’s story. AI is the beginning of our next wrestling match. And if the Torah teaches us anything, it is this: Humanity, like Jacob, has been in the business of wrestling with overwhelming forces since the dawn of history — and somehow, astonishingly, defiantly, faithfully — we always prevail. This time will be no different.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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The moral imperitave of a name: Yad Vashem documents five million Holocaust victims
The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, recently announced a monumental achievement in its mission to preserve the memory and identity of the six million Jews murdered during the Shoah. After seven decades of exhaustive global effort, the organization has recovered the names of five million victims.
This milestone is profoundly significant, arriving at a time when the last generation of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. The documentation effort is not merely a historical exercise; it is the fundamental act of restoring the individual dignity that the Nazi regime sought to strip away. Every recovered name transforms a statistic into a life, a story, and a legacy.
Beyond Numbers: Restoring the Human Scale of the Shoah
When educating about the enormous scope of the Holocaust, it is easy to lose sight of the individuals who lost their lives. The figure “six million” is overwhelming. Documenting names — one by one, often from fragments of personal testimony or scattered archival remnants — restores a sense of humanity to the unprecedented scale of the tragedy.
The recovered names come from many places: local registries, community records, deportation lists, and the Pages of Testimony that families and friends have submitted for decades. These short forms, handwritten or typed in multiple languages, often represent the only surviving trace of a life. They are not only data points but acts of mourning, love and refusal — refusal to allow history’s violence to erase the memory of the individual.
With five million names documented, Yad Vashem has brought millions of stories back into the moral and historical record. But the institution estimates that one million identities remain unaccounted for. The Nazis destroyed much of their records to hide their crimes, and there were entire communities that were completely wiped out and left no records behind.
The Last Survivors — and the First Digital Generation
The significance of this milestone is heightened by timing. We are living through the final years in which survivors can share their own stories. Their testimonies — powerful and irreplaceable — are entering the realm of historical record, rather than living experience.
As this generational transition unfolds, Yad Vashem is turning to digital tools. Machine-learning models can help researchers analyze millions of historical documents once too vast for human review. These technologies cannot replace lived memory, but they can recover names that would otherwise be permanently lost. If successful, Yad Vashem believes as many as 250,000 additional names could still be recovered.
In a sense, the project has become a race on two fronts: the natural passing of the survivors and the erosion of historical truth in an era of distortion and denial.
New York: Kristallnacht Commemoration with Global Echoes
This year’s milestone was acknowledged during the Yad Vashem USA Foundation’s annual Kristallnacht commemoration in New York. Held on November 9, the event gathered community leaders and educators under the theme “Spread the Light” — an appeal to moral clarity at a time when antisemitism is again shaping public life.
Kristallnacht, the coordinated November 1938 pogroms often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass”, marked a critical turning point in the Nazi’s attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. The foundation’s commemoration is a reminder that remembering the Holocaust is not confined to Europe or Israel but belongs to Jewish communities worldwide.
Speakers emphasized that remembrance is not simply a look backward but a form of civic action. Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan framed the effort to document names as both historical obligation and contemporary responsibility. Recovering names, he noted, is about restoring dignity — but also about equipping future generations with the moral literacy to confront hatred in their own time.
Why Names Still Matter
The recovery of individual names in an age of digital overload negates both historical erasure and modern indifference. In Jewish tradition, names carry memory and obligation, rooting people in community and history. Documenting them in the context of the Holocaust pushes back against the Nazis’ attempt to erase humanity itself. Yad Vashem’s milestone is not an endpoint but a marker on an ongoing path to restore wholeness to a shattered past, and a reminder that remembrance remains an active and morally essential task in a time of rising antisemitism.
A Continuing Mission
One million victims remain unnamed. Countless stories remain incomplete. But the work continues: in Jerusalem, in New York, in classrooms across the world, and now increasingly in the digital space, where technology and memory intersect.
The message is clear: remembrance is not merely about preserving the past but about safeguarding the moral foundations of the future.
Those who wish to support this effort — whether through education, research, or engagement — can learn more through the Yad Vashem USA Foundation and the resources available on Yad Vashem’s website: https://www.yadvashem.org/
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Jewish New Yorkers rally outside Park East Synagogue, 2 weeks after anti-Israel protest there
(JTA) — Hundreds of New York City Jews and their allies braved the cold Thursday evening for a rally outside Park East Synagogue, where pro-Palestinian protesters had demonstrated two weeks prior shouting chants like “Globalize the Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.”
Thursday’s demonstrators carried signs distributed by organizers that read “Proud New Yorkers, Jews, Zionists.” Others brought signs from home with messages including “Proudly Park East” and “Anti-Zionism is Jew hate is not OK.” Messages from speakers focused mostly on the protesters’ rhetoric and embracing Israel as an important part of Jewish life.
“This evening we come together representing the scale, strength and diversity of our incredible New York Jewish community,” said Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, which spearheaded the rally. “And we gather outside the sacred space that was so violently targeted a few weeks ago.”
In referring to “sacred space,” Goldstein was using the language that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani used when he responded to the protest in a way that many of his Jewish critics found disappointing. But if it was meant to be an allusion, Goldstein didn’t say. In fact, no one mentioned Mamdani directly from the speaker podium as a number of Jewish elected officials and community leaders addressed the crowd and denounced the rhetoric used by the protesters.
Joanna Samuels, CEO of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, came the closest with comments that appeared to allude to criticisms of the incoming mayor, a longtime and staunch devotee to the pro-Palestinian cause.
“The great leaders of our city have sought to unite people of all backgrounds around broad common goals,” she said, adding that New York’s greatest leaders “have not been ideologues.”
“Our great leaders have had the maturity and discipline to get rid of divisive language and rhetoric in service of their love of our city and their love of New Yorkers,” Samuels said. “I invite all of our leaders and our future leaders to uphold these values, and to demand them from those who speak in your name and on your behalf.”
The rally, which also featured a performance by the musician Mastisyahu, drew both critics and allies of Mamdani in politics. It represents a show of force as Jewish leaders in the city ready themselves for Mamdani’s inauguration on Jan. 1, when the city will go from having a mayor who prides himself on being pro-Israel to having one who has called for its boycott.
Mamdani was asked about the pro-Israel solidarity rally at an unrelated event earlier on Thursday.
“On those who are rallying today, and on Jewish New Yorkers across the five boroughs, I look forward to being a mayor for each and every one of them, and each and every person who calls the city home,” Mamdani said. “And being that mayor means protecting those New Yorkers, it also means celebrating and cherishing those New Yorkers.”
A spokesperson for Mamdani said two weeks ago that he would continue to “discourage” the language used at the Park East protest. But speakers on Thursday called out the protesters in far more explicit terms, saying they used antisemitic rhetoric.
Those speakers included Mark Levine, the comptroller-elect who traded endorsements with the mayor-elect, and will be one of the most powerful officials in the city government alongside Mamdani.
“We are out here in the cold to denounce the hatred that was directed at our fellow Jewish New Yorkers outside of this synagogue,” Levine asserted. “It is never OK to call for the death of anyone, as these protesters did. It is not OK to obstruct and threaten people entering a house of worship, as these protesters did.”
Levine himself has been the subject of protests by left-wing groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which endorsed Mamdani and, like the mayor-elect, opposes Levine’s intention to invest city funds in Israel bonds.
Levine also defended attendees of the event inside Park East, which was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit that facilitates North Americans’ immigration to Israel, saying, “You can be interested in immigrating to a country even if you don’t agree with every policy of the government of that country.”
He added, “And in the case of Israel, one of the most common reasons people are interested in immigrating is to flee antisemitism, which is on the rise in New York and America — a fact perhaps lost on the protesters, who were busy trying to make the attendees feel unsafe.”
Jewish State Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is running for Congress in the 12th district which includes Park East, commended Levine on social media for his “powerful words.”
Lasher arrived at the event alongside Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Jewish state senator and incoming Manhattan borough president who endorsed Lasher in October.
Both politicians had endorsed Mamdani in the general election, as did Assemblymember Alex Bores, one of Lasher’s opponents in the 12th district; Sen. Liz Krueger, who is Jewish; and City Council Member Gale Brewer, who were all present. Meanwhile, another notable attendee — Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League — has had an antagonistic relationship with the mayor-elect, who is the subject of the ADL’s “Mamdani Monitor.”
While Mamdani was alluded to in Samuels’ remarks, some attendees said they felt that he should have been discussed explicitly.
Aaron Herman, a former New York City resident who commuted in from White Plains, in Westchester County north of the city, said he and his rabbi were discussing the subject.
“He brought up to me, like, ‘There’s one thing that was missing during this incredible rally: No one actually mentioned our mayor-elect, Mamdani,’” Herman said. “The mayor-elect said something wrong. It needs to be addressed.”
Herman shared a video he took at the rally of Rabbi Avi Weiss, the founder of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in which Weiss noted that Mamdani had not been mentioned. “We’re 15 minutes into this rally and I’ve not heard the word Mamdani,” Weiss said. “He’s the problem. … I’m so proud of this rally and the people who planned it but don’t be afraid to stand up to the challenge that we face in the future — and that is the mayor elect, Mamdani.” He then sought to lead others in the crowd in chanting, “Mamdani, we are Israel.”
Still, Herman and other attendees said they appreciated the event altogether, which brought Jews from around the city to the Upper East Side. Buses were chartered from areas like Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood with many Israeli and Orthodox Jewish residents.
“It was nice to see everyone come together,” said Allison Levy, who was also among the pro-Israel counter-protesters outside the Nefesh B’Nefesh event. “I wish we could do this more often because it seems like we’re really divided, so it was nice that people showed up — especially considering how cold it is.”
The rally included performances from Jewish musician Matisyahu, who has been a vocal supporter of Israel, and Park East Synagogue’s youth choir. Park East’s 95-year-old senior rabbi, Arthur Schneier, spoke, imploring lawmakers to implement a law prohibiting protests directly outside houses of worship.
Schneier’s son Marc, also a rabbi, has urged Mamdani to support such legislation, to which Mamdani’s team has expressed openness. Lasher co-introduced a bill banning protests within 25 feet of houses of worship on Wednesday.
Other speakers included Rabbis Joseph Potasnik and Sara Hurwitz of the New York Board of Rabbis, and 92NY’s David Ingber. Potasnik is one of five rabbis sitting on Mamdani’s transition committees.
Police blocked off the entire block of 68th Street between Lexington and Third avenues, accompanied by security from Hatzalah and the Community Security Service, Jewish security groups. Multiple speakers commended the NYPD, which had previously drawn criticism for not properly responding to the initial protest, leading commissioner Jessica Tisch to apologize at a Park East Shabbat service.
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