The girl searched on Google and discovered she was in Carmel Mauda's daycare: "How could you send me there?"

"How could you send me there?". Of all the questions Yossi Havra knew would come one day, this was perhaps the hardest. Lin, his daughter, was a toddler when the Carmel Mauda affair exploded in the summer of 2019. Today she is 10 years old. For years, her parents told her almost nothing, hoping they could choose for themselves when and how to reveal the past to her. But she beat them to it: at school she started hearing from other children, went on the internet, searched for her father and the affair - and read for herself the story in which she was a child too small to understand what was happening around her.

That is not how Havra wanted his daughter to find out she was one of the victims of Carmel Mauda, the caregiver convicted of cruel abuse of toddlers, whose trial was a watershed moment regarding the handling of such cases in Israel. When Lin was in second grade, the parents of one of the children showed him a picture of her and her father that was published on the internet - and he told her that she and her father were on TV. Lin was not quick to tell her parents about it, and began to investigate on her own.

When she was in third grade, Havra says, "The teacher called me and said 'Listen, I have to share this with you. Half an hour after the children arrived I couldn't find the girl, so I started looking for her - and found her in the computer room. She was watching a report on the Carmel Mauda affair'". Only later did they understand at home how deep Lin had already gone into the story. She collected pieces of information for herself, "some kind of small puzzles", without telling her parents how much she already knew.

Confronting the Past

The story broke out again towards the end of third grade. Another child approached Lin with details he heard at home about the acts that took place at Mauda's "Baby Love" daycare in Rosh HaAyin. This time she returned to her father with a question that no longer allowed the conversation to be postponed. "From there Lin came to me and insisted on knowing", says Havra. One of the details she heard did not make sense to her, and she asked him: "Dad, who does such a thing?".

Two days later, Havra and Lin's mother sat with her and talked. For the father, it was a collision between two periods in his life. For years he was the adult who knows, he saw, read, fought, demonstrated, arrived at courts, spoke in the media and carried with him information that his daughter did not fully know. Now sat before him the girl who was then a toddler, and asked him about her own life. And then came the question that hit the most sensitive spot: "How could you send me there?".

"What do you answer to such a thing? That we didn't know. That we were lied to", Havra recalls. According to him, for a moment there was also a tone of accusation in her questions. "It was mostly why and how. She knows her father as if he is all-powerful, so how did you not know? Go explain to her that you were lied to too. But you let her express herself". Another sentence Lin said to Havra stunned him two months ago: "When I grow up a little more, I want to meet her. I will deal with her".

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Seeking Justice

In the verdict against Mauda, ongoing acts of punishment, intimidation and humiliation against helpless children were described. She was convicted of 18 acts of abuse and 35 acts of assault, committed against ten toddlers. In the sentencing, Judge Ami Kobo imposed nine and a half years of actual imprisonment, compensation of 400,000 shekels to the parents of the victims, and 12 years of suspended imprisonment.

Havra's daughter was removed from the circle of victims in the legal process, a decision that arouses his anger even today. "I demanded throughout the trial from the prosecution to release the security footage in which my daughter appears, and they simply ignored me systematically", claims Havra. In the sentencing, a toddler is documented who in one of the incidents untied the rope from the hands of another toddler and helped him. Havra, the police and the court identified that toddler as his daughter Lin.

The prosecution stated in response to these claims that the decision not to include Havra's daughter in the indictment "was made after a professional, thorough and in-depth examination, in accordance with the evidentiary infrastructure in the case and the legislation existing at the time". According to the prosecution, "Carmel was convicted of many abuse and assault offenses against children and was sentenced to a severe prison term, which was unprecedented in its severity".