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Maternity

Maternity

At ZOO Southside

By Luisa Hahn

Moria Beshari Liphshitz’s eery singing fills the stage as her fellow actor-creators Selly Arkadash and Eden Uliel slowly and deliberately unfold, hold up, and lay down white cloth sheets embroidered with the names of children, who disappeared in the Yemenite Children Affair in the 1950s. After its foundation in 1948 Jews from many countries started migrating towards the new state of Israel, amongst them over 50 000 Yemenite Jews. However, due to the aftermath of war and insufficient infrastructure many of the new arrivals were housed in camps with insufficient hygiene conditions and spreading disease before being able to settle. In this context an estimated number of hundreds to thousands Yemenite Jewish infants disappeared with their bodies and stories remaining unaccounted for, with victims suspecting – and in some instances being able to prove – that their children were given up for adoption to richer, European Jews.

The Frechot Ensemble under the direction of Hana Vazana have created a moving protest play dealing with the losses of Yemenite Jewish mothers and the theme of maternity more broadly. It draws a connection between the mothers’ powerlessness at losing their children and the institutional disregard of vulnerable mothers giving birth. The three actors bring an impactful physicality to both topics. Though the birth giving scenes set in a bureaucratic hospital environment include satirical portrayals of the dismissive doctors, the depiction of parents’ testimonies of the losses of their children and the investigative hearings in his aftermath are infused with a seriousness that reflects the graveness of the source material.

The show is both personal in telling the stories of the Yemenite mothers and political in bringing attention to their history and condemning the continuous lack of justice they’ve received. The most powerful moment bringing together these two dimensions is in the final scene, in which the three women synchronously portray a birth scene, which ends in shattering horror when there are no babies afterwards and the women’s out-stretched hands remain empty.