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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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Iran Hits Ships and UAE Oil Port in Show of Force After Trump Orders Navy to Open Strait
Ships and boats in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Iran hit several ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and set a UAE oil port ablaze, following President Donald Trump‘s announcement that he will use the US Navy to free up shipping.
The Iranian attacks marked the war’s biggest escalation since a ceasefire was declared four weeks ago.
Trump‘s new mission “Project Freedom,” which he announced on social media overnight to release ships stuck in the strait, was the first apparent attempt to make use of naval power to unblock the world’s most important energy shipping route.
But at least in the initial hours on Monday, the effort brought no surge of merchant shipping through the strait while provoking a show of force from Iran, which had long threatened to respond to any escalation with new attacks on its neighbors.
The US military said two US merchant ships had made it through the strait, without saying when. Iran denied any such crossings had taken place.
The commander of US forces in the region said his fleet had destroyed six small Iranian boats, which Iran also denied. Admiral Brad Cooper said he “strongly advised” Iranian forces to keep clear of US military assets carrying out the mission.
Iranian authorities, for their part, released a map of what they said was an expanded sea area now under their control, which went far beyond the strait to include swathes of international waters, including long stretches of the United Arab Emirates’ coastline on either side of the strait.
South Korea reported one of its merchant ships had been hit by an explosion and fire inside the strait. The British maritime security agency UKMTO reported two ships had been hit off the coast of the UAE, and the Emirati oil company ADNOC said one of its empty oil tankers was hit by Iranian drones while trying to cross.
“Iran has taken some shots at unrelated Nations with respect to the Ship Movement, PROJECT FREEDOM, including a South Korean Cargo Ship. Perhaps it’s time for South Korea to come and join the mission!” Trump posted on social media on Monday.
After reported drone and missile attacks inside the UAE throughout the day, including one that caused a fire at an important oil port, the UAE said Iranian attacks marked a serious escalation and it reserved the right to respond.
STRAIT STILL BLOCKED
Trump has struggled to find a solution to the disruption of international energy supplies caused by Iran‘s blockade of the strait, which carried a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas before the war.
In the more than two months since Trump launched an air war against Iran alongside Israel, Tehran has largely blocked the strait to ships apart from its own. Since last month, the United States has imposed its own blockade of ships leaving and entering Iranian ports, further crippling Iran’s already ailing economy.
The warring sides issued contradictory statements on Monday about the initial impact of the new US mission, and Reuters could not independently verify the full situation there.
But there was no immediate sign that large numbers of merchant ships were making new attempts to cross, and major shipping companies said they were likely to wait for an agreed end to hostilities before trying to sail through.
REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS SAY NO TRANSITS TOOK PLACE
In a post on X, US Central Command said some of its Navy guided-missile destroyers were inside the Gulf supporting the operation, and that two US-flagged merchant vessels had crossed the strait “and are safely headed on their journey.”
It did not identify either the warships or the merchant vessels or say when any of those crossings had taken place.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said no commercial vessels had crossed the strait in the past few hours, and that US claims to the contrary were false.
Earlier, Iran said it had fired on a US warship approaching the strait, forcing it to turn around. An initial Iranian report had said a US warship was struck, but Washington denied this and Iranian officials later described the fire as warning shots.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said there was a fire and an explosion onboard the Namu, a merchant ship operated by South Korean shipper HMM. Yonhap news agency reported that the government was checking intelligence indicating the vessel may have been attacked.
The UAE, meanwhile, reported a fire at an oil installation in its port of Fujairah following an Iranian drone attack. Fujairah lies beyond the strait, making it one of the few export routes for Middle East oil that does not require passing through it.
SHIPPING INDUSTRY AWAITS CLARITY ON SAFETY
Oil prices jumped more than 5% in volatile trade as news of the increased Iranian attacks emerged.
In his social media post announcing the new mission, Trump gave few details of what action the US Navy would take to get ships through the strait.
“We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business,” Trump wrote.
In response, Iran‘s unified command told commercial ships and oil tankers:
“We have repeatedly said the security of the Strait of Hormuz is in our hands and that the safe passage of vessels needs to be coordinated with the armed forces … We warn that any foreign armed forces, especially the aggressive US Army, will be attacked if they intend to approach and enter the Strait of Hormuz.”
The United States and Israel suspended their bombing campaign against Iran four weeks ago, and US and Iranian officials held one round of face-to-face talks. But attempts to set up further meetings have failed.
Iranian state media said on Sunday that Washington had conveyed its response to a 14-point Iranian proposal via Pakistan, and that Tehran was now reviewing it. Neither side gave details of any US response.
The Iranian proposal would postpone discussion of Iran‘s nuclear program until after an agreement to end the war and resolve the standoff over shipping. Trump said over the weekend he was still studying it but would probably reject it.
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Australia Begins Hearings Into Bondi Beach Attack and Rising Antisemitism
Rabbi Levi Wolff lights a menorah at Bondi Pavilion to honor the victims of a shooting during a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
Australia began public hearings on Monday in an inquiry into the Bondi Beach mass shooting in December, with Jewish Australians giving evidence of their experience of rising domestic antisemitism.
The attack on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration killed 15, fueling calls for tougher gun controls and more action to tackle hatred toward Jews, following a spate of antisemitic incidents.
The first block of public hearings will investigate the nature and prevalence of antisemitism, said Virginia Bell, the retired judge leading the wide-ranging national inquiry known as a Royal Commission.
“The sharp spike in antisemitism that we’ve witnessed in Australia has been mirrored in other Western countries and seems clearly linked to events in the Middle East,” Bell said.
“It’s important that people understand how quickly those events can prompt ugly displays of hostility toward Jewish Australians simply because they’re Jews.”
‘WE DON’T FEEL SAFE HERE’
Witnesses from the Jewish community told the inquiry they felt increasingly unsafe amid rising hostility since the October 2023 start of the war in Gaza.
“What is happening in Australia today is not a faint echo of a distant past,” said Peter Halasz, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who fled to Australia from Hungary.
“For those of us who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, it is something we recognize, and that recognition is frightening and cause for alarm.”
Sheina Gutnick, who lost her father Reuven Morrison in the Bondi attack, said antisemitism had damaged her family’s sense of safety and freedom of movement.
“As a mother, I’m constantly weighing up the risk of exposing my children to environments where they may be witness, or subject, to antisemitism,” she told the panel.
She recounted an incident in which a stranger at a shopping center called her an “effing terrorist” for wearing a Star of David necklace.
Another witness said her family was relocating to Israel because of safety concerns.
“We never expected synagogues to be burned down,” said the woman, who used the pseudonym “AAM.” “We never expected Jews to be hunted on Bondi Beach.
“My family and I no longer want to live in Australia. We don’t feel safe here. We don’t feel welcome.”
JEWISH SCHOOL LOOKS ‘MORE LIKE A PRISON’
Stefanie Schwartz, the president of Sydney Jewish primary school Mount Sinai College, spoke of holding drills to prepare young students to deal with terrorist attacks, and requiring an “extreme” security presence on campus.
“You walk past our school, and it looks a lot more like a prison than a primary school.”
Antisemitism has “run riot,” with Jewish Australians being held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, said Benjamin Elton, the chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney.
The inquiry released an interim report of 14 recommendations last Thursday, urging greater security for Jewish public events and further counterterrorism and gun reforms.
A second block of hearings later in May will focus on the circumstances leading up to the Bondi Beach attack and issues raised in the interim report.
The commission is due to deliver its final report on Dec. 14, exactly a year after the attack.
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A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews?
The Battle of Cable Street, a 1936 street scuffle off an obscure stretch of road in London’s East End, holds a totemic importance to the Jews of England, and, given how few they are in number, a correspondingly small significance in the larger British imagination.
The musical Cable Street, dramatizing that showdown between Jewish and Irish East Enders against Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts, arrives Off-Broadway from London amid a spate of headlines about the safety of English Jews and a subsequent minimization of their fears. Only now, the political alignment of those defending or hectoring Jews has recalibrated from the days the play examines.
In his rhetoric and tactics, the anti-Islam “activist” Tommy Robinson, who antagonizes Muslim neighborhoods and marched through Central London in his “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, would appear to be the heir apparent to a Mosley, with the exception that he presents himself as a friend of the Jews. (Most Jews in the U.K. won’t have him; the Israeli far-right welcomed him to the Jewish state last October.)
On the left, the multicultural coalition has found a cause in Palestinian rights, which they march for like clockwork. Jews, who in the U.K. make up about .5% of the population but a whole 29% of recorded religious hate crimes, don’t count in their social justice calculus, comedian David Baddiel has argued. Evidence is mounting in that direction.
Police have surrendered to community leaders pushing to cancel an Israeli soccer club match, fabricating evidence with A.I. post facto to make it seem like the Israel fans will be the violent faction. A Panorama documentary from last month makes an earnest case for Jewish anxiety, but aired only after the BBC was made to review their standards over stories on Gaza following the network running a documentary that failed to disclose its narrator was the son of a Hamas minister. (This to my mind is nowhere near as egregious as the channel’s reluctance some years before to back down from blaming Orthodox children for their own abuse by mistranslating a word of Hebrew into an anti-Arab slur.)
Jews being gunned down outside shuls on Yom Kippur or stabbed in the streets – as they were just last week, two days before I saw this musical — don’t mobilize the masses. They do get the odd pundit condemning the violence, only to then to whatabout with the humanitarian disaster in Gaza or blame Jewish institutions’ efforts to conflate Jews and Israel, as if only when uncoupled will their targeting be truly horrendous.
British Jews are so much a rounding error they could hardly sway a council election. That fact scarcely moves the needle on the old libels of governmental control, as Labour responds to violence with crack downs on pro-Palestinian protests.
The development of Cable Street goes back years before the current bloodletting, yet it has hit on a rhyme in history.
The story provides a framing device of a present-day walking tour before jumping back in time to follow three youths and their families: Irish immigrant Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Essin-Kelly), who dreams of a writer’s life during her day job rolling bagels; Sammy Scheinberg (a dynamic Isaac Gryn), who wants to be a boxer against the wishes of his shmata business father; and Ron (Barney Wilkinson) a recent Lancashire transplant, underemployed, with hair the color of threshed wheat, ripe for recruitment by a band of populist nativists.
The show finds hope in an unlikely coalition of Irish dockworkers, Jews and Communists rallying to stop a police-escorted British Union of Fascists (BUF) march through London’s Jewish Quarter. The parable is so near to today’s headlines that it can make one’s head spin, and, in the particular case of a Jew, scan for allies. Better luck in New York, with the Brits Off Broadway festival, than across the pond, where this may be taken as a more general parable, with Jews as allegorical victims standing in for other marginalized groups. To read into the story the excesses of today’s protests, and what the authorities allow under the pretext of free speech, would surely be sacrilege, depending on which marchers it’s applied to and where your loyalties lie.
The music by Tim Gilvin has shades of what I’ll call Hebraic Hamilton (“Dream of making the dough, making the bread, baking the challah,” Sammy spits bars over a backbeat). There’s an Irish jig and a ballad that sounds like Coldplay, and “Only Words,” an elegiac plea from a Jewish father to his hothead son. (Jez Unwin plays the Scheinberg patriarch, a modern-day descendant and the leader of the Stepney BUF.) A ragtime number of chattering broadsheets sellers feeds us intermittent exposition.
The introduction of the BUF imagines them as a ‘90s boy band, making fun before they prove their menace. It works better downtown, when the Nazis in another British import, Operation Mincemeat, do their K-Pop number, as that show is an all-out farce.
Better by far is the play’s treatment of Jewish scenes, scripted by book writer Alex Kanefsky with deft direction by Adam Lenson. We hear a hamotzi, see a synagogue (with an implied women’s balcony) and hear a refrain of Sholem Aleichem and Sim Shalom integrated into musically layered sequences.
The indefatigable cast of 13 plays countless characters, switching allegiances from Mosleyites to Jews at the donning of an armband. This can lead to odd stage imagery, as when musician-actor Max Alexander-Taylor is togged up like a blackshirt while riffing on an electric guitar. (The rest of the band is on a top level, shielded in by the corrugated metal and chainlink of Yoav Segal’s set design.)
But there are moments of sublime stage work, après Les Miz, as the story’s action rises and the street mounts a defense with slogans borrowed from Spanish Republicans. The play, in its chilling wisdom, doesn’t stop at this high point. It allows room for what followed: The BUF’s membership only grew after the battle. Regrouping, they retaliated with a pogrom against the Jews. This time, no one showed up to defend them.
The cringey lyric of the battle song — “we’re not like the others, we won’t let you demonize our sisters and brothers” — is replaced with a more sober conclusion from Sammy’s sister in the wreckage of the attack.
After noting how “the rich blame the poor, the poor blame the rich and everybody hates the Jews,” Rosa Scheinberg (Romona Lewis-Malley) laments that “when the common enemy’s defeated, old wounds flare up, and old mistakes get repeated.” Solidarity was but a brief and shining moment.
As a concession to hope, the show doesn’t end there, but it very well might.
The musical Cable Street plays at 59E59 in New York through May 24. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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