Last week, after nearly a half-century apart, mother and daughter were reunited here after DNA tests supported their blood relationship. Their remarkable saga gives new credence to one of Israel's most persistent and shocking conspiracy theories - that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Yemenite babies were kidnapped in the late 1940s and 1950s and sold for adoption to European Jews.
For decades, Yemenite Jews have alleged that their babies were stolen by authorities when they first immigrated to Israel, and either sold to wealthy Jewish families or given to Ashkenazi, or European, Jews who had lost children in the Holocaust. The stories seemed too incredible to be true - until the reunion of Margalit Umassi and the missing baby, now a 48-year-old Sacramento resident named Tsila Levine.
``You can't cheat DNA. I don't have a shadow of a doubt that this is my family,'' Levine testified yesterday before an Israeli investigative commission in Jerusalem.
The Israeli government has asked that Levine take another DNA test to confirm the result of the first, which was conducted privately by a geneticist from Hebrew University.
Levine was raised by Polish Jews on a kibbutz in northern Israel. She knew all along that she was adopted. In 1976, when Israel passed a law giving adopted children the right to see their files, she went to an adoption agency in Haifa, where her parents said she had been adopted.
``They said they have absolutely no information about my case, not even a document that confirms my existence,'' Levine testified yesterday. ``They said I'd better stop searching for my roots, and that I would only come face to face with a brick wall if I did so.''
Levine said her adopted mother, whom she adored, had also warned that there might be something strange about the adoption. She said she was told that couples interested in adopting children at the time ``were told that the deal was that you get a baby, but don't ask questions.''
