BS”D

I remember her sitting on the porch, her eyes looking into the distance even though they were already weakened by age or by sorrow, from the tears that she cried daily, "Tsiyon, oh Tsiyon."

And I asked her, "Grandma, who is Tsiyon?"

"That was the child they took from me."

I look at the wrinkles that cross her face, like the dirt roads of her life.

How much sorrow, how much sadness, how much never-ending and continuing pain. Her eyes never dried until her dying day.

And I absorbed her sorrow, her pain, for years. All the years I thought, "How is it possible to do such a thing?"

It is an inhuman act, to take a mother's baby, immediately after his birth, what evil! It is a quiet holocaust.

My grandmother Brakha immigrated to Israel in March 1950 from Yemen with her husband, my grandfather, Avraham, and their six children.

After three months she gave birth to a seventh son in the Dajani hospital in Jaffa. A beautiful and healthy boy. During the course of her hospital stay, after three days or so, she contracted an eye infection and when she asked to breastfeed her baby they told her he was gone. Dead. He’d been sick and he died.

She even received a fake death certificate (kept by my parents). She demanded to see him, cried, begged, did not understand what happened. But they took her by force from her bed, told her to go home immediately, took her to the steps of the hospital where she sat down and cried. A woman, recovering from giving birth, thrown from the hospital by doctors and nurses, a new immigrant. How? How does such a thing happen??

My grandmother, like many others, is a victim of a holocaust. An institutional holocaust.