My parents Sa’ida and Yosef Hoter immigrated to Israel from Yemen in 1949 with my siblings Yona, Naomi, David and the kidnapped sister Gazel, whose name was changed to Mazal when she was a year old.
Gazal was born in 1948. My parents were sent to the immigrants camp Ein Shemer. One day, two nurses came to the camp and took my little sister Gazel to the nursery in Ein Shemer, under the pretense that my parents’ residence was overcrowded. My mother went to the nursery and nursed my sister Gazel for two days.

On the third day, when my mother came to nurse Gazel, she saw that she was not in her bed. My mother asked where the girl was, and she was told that Gazel was transferred to a hospital in Pardes Hanna.

My mother went back to the camp, and my father immediately went to the hospital i Pardes Hanna. He asked why they had taken Gazel to the hospital. They told him that she had a wound in her neck. Father visited Gazel every day in hospital, and on the third day when he visited Gazel, he saw that her bed was empty and asked where she was.

They told him that she was dead and they had buried her.

My father did not have full command of Hebrew and found it hard to communicate with the nurses. He went home and told my mother and other family members what they told him. There was great weeping and sorrow that cannot be described in words. Mother said that it could not be—Gazel was not ill—and my father paced back and forth restlessly with a bad feeling. My parents did not see Gazel’s body, there was no burial, and my parents did not sit shiva.

That my parents—and all the other Yemenis who were religious and strictly observed Jew law and commandments—did not sit shiva only stresses the fact that they felt and knew, and were so sure, that their daughter was not dead but rather was kidnapped.

For a long time my parents received food stamps for my sister Gazel, until they moved from the Ein Shemer immigrants camp to Kfar Zeitim (near Tiberias). Even there my parents received food stamps for my sister Gazel for about a year, until my father told the person who delivered the food stamps that his daughter had disappeared, and from that moment they stopped giving him food stamps for Gazel.

We have never received a death certificate and there is no grave. My parents don’t even have a birth certificate for her.

In the years that have since passed, my parents have received no documents for their kidnapped daughter Gazel. My sister Gazel’s disappearance gave them no respite. When we moved to Rishon LeZion, and my parents had already mastered the Hebrew language, my father went to the Ministry of the Interior and demanded to know what had become of Gazel, only to be told they did not know a thing about his case.

We appealed to the committees established by the state, to check what exactly had happened to Gazel, and we were told that she had died in Haifa. How could she have died in Haifa when at the time they told my parents that she had died in the Pardes Hanna hospital? They also told my father Gazel’s name was changed to Mazal, and that the family name was changed from Hoter to Taoter.

Attached are photos of my parents and my siblings. We are all filled with hope to be reunited with my sister.

My parents died in great sorrow, without knowing what happened to their daughter. We have no desire for revenge, God forbid, but we do long in our hearts to see our sister, and to tell her how present she was in our parents’ and our hearts all the years since her kidnapping.