With thanks to reader Alex Corvino, here is a detailed update [UPDATE: and another here] to the story about the “smuggling” of Yemenite Jews from Monsey, NY, to Israel, that I blogged about last week. Basically, the Jewish Agency claims that the family in question was being held against its will, while the Satmar Hasidim who lodged the family, as well as some family members who remained in Monsey, vigorously deny the charges. The Jewish Agency claims that the Satmar are indoctrinating the Yemenites into the Satmar’s obscure (and Eastern European) brand of Judaism, while the Satmar claim to have only the purest of humanitarian motives.
This reminds me of an incident that happened in Israel, I think in the 1950s, but I can’t find anything about it online. As I recall, a Jewish boy in Israel was kidnapped from his mother and sent to live abroad with one of the Hasidic sects, which was trying to protect him from the secular influences of his mother. The incident caused a great deal of tension between the religious and secular population in the new Jewish state, and the Mossad was dispatched to locate the boy and return him to his mother, which is what occurred. If anyone has a link to the full story, please let me know.
Update:
Here’s a link about the kidnapped boy, whose name was Yossele Schumacher.
Blogger Miriam Shaviv beat me to the Yossele analogy by several days.
FURTHER UPDATE: My observation that the Monsey story is reminiscent of the Yossele story should not be taken as suggesting that I have concluded that the Satmar in Monsey have done anything inappropriate with regard to their Yemenite charges. Indeed, the stories linked to above suggest that the Yemenite mother who left with her (assumedly minor) children for Israel did so against the wishes of the father, which, if true, would seems a presumptively inappropriate action for the Jewish Agency to support.
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