Amid this unsettling period when we Israelis are waiting daily to learn whether we are going to be thrust into the middle of a war with Iran, a new and sad story has dominated our news.
Two babies arrived dead at Jerusalem hospital emergency centers: three-month-old Leah Tzipora Goloventzitz and six-month-old Aharon Katz. Dozens of babies were arriving at Jerusalem hospitals for emergency care.
Within minutes of seeing this horrifying story on a news site on my phone, I received a WhatsApp message from a friend in Los Angeles: “Rumors are spreading that Israelis are poisoning Arab babies in a daycare center.”
Of course, this sounded absurd. Still, I went back to the news flash to see if I had misread the story. But no, it was Romema and not Ramallah. The babies were being transported from HaMem-Gimmel Street.
HaMem-Gimmel means “the 43rd Street,” and it’s reputedly named in memory of 43 Moroccan Jews who drowned while trying to reach Israel.
For those unfamiliar with Jerusalem geography, Romema is a neighborhood near the entrance to the city when you are arriving from Tel Aviv. Among famous landmarks in Romema were the Biblical Zoo, the Israel Television building, and The Jerusalem Post building, amid the garages and factories that dominate the area. Magen David Adom has its center there.
The residents were mostly of low socioeconomic status, living in rows of public housing built in the 1950s. In the early 1980s, our children’s late and beloved pediatrician, an idealistic Harvard medical honors graduate from Los Angeles, set up office on HaMem-Gimmel Street to serve the needy population.
But in the last two decades, properties were bought by developers. Luxury apartments and high-end shops now dominate the area which abuts the Central Bus Station and the Yitzhak Navon Train Station.
Ours is a baby-centered nation, with the highest birthrate in the developed world. Contrast that, for example, with China, where the birthrate falls every year – this year down 17% – despite the introduction of policies aimed at encouraging women to have children. Decades of one-child policy mean that today’s Chinese adults are socially conditioned to one-child households.
In Israel, parents of two children may be asked why they have such a small family. Baby booms usually take place after wars; our current boom began during the Israel-Hamas War.
That two infants died in a childcare center horrified us. The images of babies in the daycare center being transported without their parents also elicit scary Jewish people flashbacks. The fear that dozens of babies were suffering from dangerous exposure was real, shocking, and horrifying. But almost as fast as the anti-Israel rumor appeared on my phone, came a spate of other rumors and toxic prejudice that made the tragedy worse.
When tragedy turns into accusation
Pictures of babies in bathrooms and cramped corners flooded the media.
United Hatzalah rescue volunteer Daniel Katzenstein, in his interview with Shir Perets in In Jerusalem (January 23, 2026), said: “As far as the kid in every corner and in the bathroom, all that stuff, that’s bogus. Because what happened was that when they [Hatzalah] went in to start CPR, they moved the kids out of the room into any other available area.”
The death of two babies was heartbreaking; it didn’t have to become an occasion for haredi-bashing.
Let’s admit that there is fury with the ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstratively turning their healthy backs on military service while other families are risking their lives protecting Israel. Their proffered justifications are galling. With five of our children and grandchildren in uniform, I detest the politics that threaten to enshrine the privileged position of the draft dodgers. We feel powerless to stop this sacrilege.
Still, the willingness and ability to bring up large families (slightly decreased average from seven to six children per working woman) should garner some admiration. There are cadres of women who have nine and 10 children who also work as their family’s primary wage earners. Maybe we’re jealous of grandparents with 50 grandchildren. It’s easy but incorrect to brand the parents as negligent and assume they don’t love their children as much as we love ours.
Israel’s valiant rescue services quickly removed the remaining 52 babies while the cause of the two babies’ deaths was still suspected to be a gas leak or CO2. The youngest baby was reportedly three weeks old. There were toddlers and preschoolers, too. Each rescuer was in charge of a single unnamed baby.
On their arrivals at Hadassah’s two medical centers and Shaare Zedek Medical Center, staff rushed forward to receive the babies with loving arms. Temporary bands were slipped on the tiny wrists. Social workers in the three hospitals shared photos of the babies so parents could identify their children and not have to race from one hospital to another.
“In Israel, we sadly have experience in mass casualties like terror attacks, so we know how to get organized fast,” said Prof. Ariel Tenenbaum, head of pediatrics at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem. “The unexpected is the expected to us.”
“When the parents arrived, they were in a difficult emotional state,” said Dr. David Rechtman, head of the pediatric emergency room at Hadassah-University Medical Center on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus. “Not only were they terrified for their children, but they felt under attack, as if the whole world was saying they didn’t care enough for their children.”
One dad spoke on Israel Radio of his panic at learning that his baby daughter might have been injured. But he also insisted to the inquisitive KAN Reshet Bet reporter that he and his wife had done their research and had received numerous recommendations from satisfied parents who had used that daycare service over decades.
“Every afternoon when I picked up our baby daughter, I received a detailed report from a caretaker about how much she had eaten and slept.”
All the doctors I spoke to for this column told me that the children were all tidy and healthy, except for the few who had mild winter illnesses. The older tots came wearing decorative ribbons from a celebration. Some brought coloring art projects.
Parents were requested to sleep at the hospitals with their children. Breakfast would be served; and if everyone was well, they would be on their way home by 7 a.m.
“The experience for the children must have been like UFOs arriving from outer space,” said Tenenbaum. “Imagine being scooped up by a stranger, transferred to a hospital with bright lights, and then having someone take a blood sample.”
The experienced medical teams in the three hospitals consulted with one another to see if anyone had found a clue to the tragedy on HaMem-Gimmel Street. None had.
Yes, the daycare center was unlicensed, and that was wrong; but licensing isn’t always a guarantee of quality. Looking back, I don’t remember if I ever checked if the fairy godmother Rachel to whom we entrusted our toddlers had a license. I watched her from my balcony rolling kubbeh with little ones and heard her singing classic Hebrew nursery songs.
All the doctors with whom I spoke regretted the family and court decision not to pursue an answer. “I hear Leah Tzipora and Aharon screaming from the grave,” said one doctor. “We need to know what happened when two children died in the same room.”
Another doctor said there’s a bigger problem of babies’ deaths rarely being fully investigated in any sectors.
We have many problems to solve in Israel, but we can’t afford to be blindsided by our own prejudices or by those of persons seeking any excuse to demonize our country.■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, with Holocaust survivor Rena Quint, who is celebrating her 90th birthday.