jerusalem

Israel's Ministry of Science has offered to fund DNA tests for 1,000 Israelis of Yemenite extraction to resolve a long-standing controversy about the fate of children who may have been adopted without their parents' knowledge or consent.

In the early 1950s, a number of Yemenite parents who had recently immigrated to Israel from Yemen and who were living in poverty in transit camps were told that children of theirs who had been hospitalized had died. Often, the parents were taken to their children's supposed graves. Many suspected, however, that the children had been adopted by wealthier families.

These suspicions are supported by testimony heard by a government commission investigating the affair. Earlier this year, an Israeli-born woman now living in the United States travelled to Israel for a DNA test and claims to have been reunited with her biological parents as a result.

In a proposal to the Knesset's special committee on research and science and development affairs, Adam Friedman, director of the Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering Unit at Hadassah University Hospital, said that family relationship could be determined by comparing the alleles of several DNA markers in adopted children with those of their supposed biological parents or siblings.

If a given allele is rare among Yemenite Jews, it can provide a strong indication of genetic relationship between two people who carry it, Friedman explained. The greater the number of such rare alleles that are found to be shared by two people, the greater the probability that they are close relatives, he added.

Yemenite Jewish groups now want the government to conduct such tests on all the affected families and on children who were adopted during the early 1950s. Friedman estimates that such a large-scale test would cost about $200,000.

Mordecai Bashari, the director-general of Israel's Ministry of Science, who is a physicist by training and is himself of Yemenite extraction, has described the sum as a “ridiculously small amount” and has offered to find it from his ministry's budget.

But although 435 Yemenite Jewish families have applied to the science committee requesting DNA testing, only 35 of the 830 adopted individuals identified by the investigative commission as connected to the affair have asked to be tested. Dalia Itzik, chair of the committee, points out that there is no legal way to force them to be tested.

The families involved also want the putative graves of their children to be opened and any bones found to be tested. But Yehuda Hiss, director of the Pathological Institute of the Ministry of Health, says that none of Israel's genetic laboratories has enough experience in extracting and analysing DNA from bones to obtain results that would be acceptable as evidence in court, so they would have to be sent abroad for analysis.