My parents, Michael and Cmisa Huri, immigrated to Israel from Tunisia in 1948 with 2 children after 3 had died. On February 17, 1952 my mother gave birth to healthy twin boys at Rambam Hospital in Haifa. During the first year, social workers approached my mother with the proposition to help look after the twins. They were new immigrants from Tunisia and they took Gabriel to a daycare on Geula Street, Haifa. After a few days my mother heard of kidnappings. She went to the daycare, took my brother home and refused to take him to the daycare from then on. The second twin, Uziel, contracted polio. My mother said it was not polio but only arthritis and he was treated with blue light therapy at Ibn Sina clinic and at Rambam Hospital in Haifa. My older sister helped take care of him. Again they offered to help my parents care for him, my mother really protested but my father convinced her and my mother took him for treatment at a daycare centre on Abbas Street, Haifa. These were the days before Passover and the boy was a year and two months old. My parents came to see him, saw that the boy was happy and well looked after. They told themselves, just a few days and we can take him home. But that same week they moved him to Ramot HaShavim near Ra’anana without my parents’ knowledge. That was the location of Beit Feinstone, where they treated chronic polio patients... My parents came to visit him in Haifa and were told that he had been transferred to Ramot Hashavim. They went there, he saw them and was very happy. A nurse was feeding him when they arrived and was very angry at my parents, why did you come, you’re disturbing the child, and they were asked to leave. About a week later my father gets a telegram to come urgently, the child had died. My father went and asked to see the body and they told him, you leave, we’ll bury him, there’s an old man here too, we’ll bury them together. They took a rolled up bedsheet and said this was his son, they didn’t show him a body or anything. My father was given some money and he returned home without the body. All these years My mother claimed that he was alive. 40 years ago my older brother received an anonymous phone call telling him our brother is alive. We invited reporter Amos Carmeli to our house, my parents told the story, they thought maybe something would turn up following the article. But in vain. About 30 years ago my nephew was hospitalized in Beit Loewenstein in Ra’anana and when my mother came to visit him she fainted, she was so moved, she remembered this was where my brother was in the 50’s.

Even the same X and beds. She remembered which bed was his. Beit Feinstone and Loewenstein Hospital merged in 1959. We went to the archives and asked, maybe there’s a medical file or something, and sure enough there was a file with his name on it and it was said he had died. We asked for the files and they requested a notarized affidavit. We came a week later and the file was no longer there, someone saw to it that it disappeared (inside the file there was not even one medical document indicating the parent’s names or the cause of death). We received three different death certificates, one missing a doctor’s signature, the second with no cause of death and the third empty.

Around that time we got a phone call from Hechal Shlomo (Heichal Shlomo) saying they found out where my brother was buried. We arrived at Sgula cemetery and my father was shown three plots with nothing but sand and they told my father, one of these is your son. My father said, which will I say Kaddish for... We were with the Shalgi committee and gave testimony about my brother's disappearance. We didn’t receive a copy of the protocol. In 1992 Yehuda Kantor came out to the media and ever since we’ve had a close relationship, my parents claimed that he was their son. The DNA tests were negative, but we got an explanation from one Professor Brightman, I think, that everything was a cover up and we have no chance of getting any real data. There are many signs that connect us with Yehuda. It’s all sad and very painful. Thanks for reading.

Mazal Tov Berko