“I’m still waiting for my child… Every man I meet, I think maybe that’s my son”
A protest performance, based on a true story, gives stage to voiceless mothers.
The show examines the experience of oppressed child-birth and exposes a dark affair from the 1950׳s about the systematic kidnapping of immigrant children, whose fate, is unknown. “Maternity” searches for an emotional connection between those mothers and women from all over the world.
In the early years of the State of Israel, especially during the1950s, thousands of babies and infants vanished from their families– new immigrants who were housed in refugee absorption camps. About two thirds of these children were from families who had immigrated from Yemen. Maternity seeks to bring to the fore the voices that have been silences for so many years, the mothers of the abducted children, and to find the connection between them and us, the women and mothers of today. One of the most striking aspects of the Yemenite Children Affair is the silencing. Silence – in part dictated by external forces, and in part so deeply ingrained in experience that the women impose it on themselves– recurs and in every part of Maternity: the women in the maternity hospital who are told not to ask any questions; the mothers who remain mute in their encounter with the medical staff; the nurses who choose to avoid answering any questions; and the adopted girl who encounters a wall of silence in her adoptive parents. Silencing is an inseparable part of expropriation, and in the absence of a voice, the women’s ownership of the narrative and their experience is also absent. To give the women a voice we chose to use four types of testimony: mothers who tell their stories and refuse to forget and be forgotten; testimonies of nurses, based on the commission of inquiry’s investigation, and which shed partial, evasive light on the abduction mechanism; a granddaughter who tells the story of her grandmother, illustrating the intergenerational transference of the trauma; and the poem “Maternity” by Iris Eliya Cohen.
Show length: 75 min
Ha’Frehot Ensemble is a collective of women-creators dealing with issues of ethnicity, feminism and activism, discussing the complex political reality.
Director: Hanna Vazana-Grunwald
Actresses: Sally Arkady, Moriah Bashari-Lifshitz, Eden Uliel, Abigail Ard-Cellist
“I’m still waiting for my child… Every man I meet, I think maybe that’s my son”
A protest performance, based on a true story, gives stage to voiceless mothers.
The show examines the experience of oppressed child-birth and exposes a dark affair from the 1950׳s about the systematic kidnapping of immigrant children, whose fate, is unknown. “Maternity” searches for an emotional connection between those mothers and women from all over the world.
In the early years of the State of Israel, especially during the1950s, thousands of babies and infants vanished from their families– new immigrants who were housed in refugee absorption camps. About two thirds of these children were from families who had immigrated from Yemen. Maternity seeks to bring to the fore the voices that have been silences for so many years, the mothers of the abducted children, and to find the connection between them and us, the women and mothers of today. One of the most striking aspects of the Yemenite Children Affair is the silencing. Silence – in part dictated by external forces, and in part so deeply ingrained in experience that the women impose it on themselves– recurs and in every part of Maternity: the women in the maternity hospital who are told not to ask any questions; the mothers who remain mute in their encounter with the medical staff; the nurses who choose to avoid answering any questions; and the adopted girl who encounters a wall of silence in her adoptive parents. Silencing is an inseparable part of expropriation, and in the absence of a voice, the women’s ownership of the narrative and their experience is also absent. To give the women a voice we chose to use four types of testimony: mothers who tell their stories and refuse to forget and be forgotten; testimonies of nurses, based on the commission of inquiry’s investigation, and which shed partial, evasive light on the abduction mechanism; a granddaughter who tells the story of her grandmother, illustrating the intergenerational transference of the trauma; and the poem “Maternity” by Iris Eliya Cohen.
Show length: 75 min
Ha’Frehot Ensemble is a collective of women-creators dealing with issues of ethnicity, feminism and activism, discussing the complex political reality.
Director: Hanna Vazana-Grunwald
Actresses: Sally Arkady, Moriah Bashari-Lifshitz, Eden Uliel, Abigail Ard-Cellist
