It was a cloudy Saturday afternoon. Adelina Corrêa Lopes dos Santos was waiting, sitting on a bench, rubbing her hands, visibly nervous.
At 62 years old, that woman with brown eyes and hair was about to meet her son.
Lior Vilk traveled from Israel, where he grew up, to Brazil to meet Adelina, after discovering she was one of thousands of Brazilian children trafficked abroad in the 1980s.
After 16 years of searching, he was finally going to be reunited with his biological mother in a square in the municipality of Joinville, in the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil.
The reunion was the product of a lot of effort, comings and goings, some strokes of luck, including a conversation he overheard, and a DNA bank.
Mother and son waited almost four decades for that reunionwhich occurred in July and was witnessed by the BBC.
Until then, Lior seemed calm. “I tried to hide it, but I was moved to tears.”
“Forgive me because I couldn’t raise you.”
Some children were playing in the playground in the square, near the nursing home where Adelina receives care because she suffers from epilepsy.
“While I was heading towards that place, I couldn’t hear the people, the noises. I just saw myself walking under the trees until I reached it,” says Lior.
The man broke the silence with a muffled “hello.” Adelina looked back surprised.
“When he sat next to me, I was shocked. I felt happy”says Adelina.
Their eyes filled with tears and they hugged each other.
“All the stress disappeared. Suddenly, it was just me and her,” Lior recalls. They had a long conversation.
“I told him that I am his mother,” Adelina remembers. “’Forgive me because I couldn’t raise you,’ I said.”
The mother and her son saw each other a few days before by video call.
“In front of the camera, she didn’t look like me,” says Lior, who is 38 years old, with blue eyes and gray hair. He used to be brown, like Adelina’s.
Although he is tanned, Lior has white skin, like his mother. “Looking at her face, we do look alike”.
“It is a dream come true. There were many disappointments but also resistance,” says Lior.
“A chapter that lasted half my life is over.”
The separation
Adelina separated from Lior when he was born in 1985. She was 24 years old and he was her third child. He had chosen a name for him: Leandro.
He decided to return to live with his father and seven siblings. Her mother died when she was little.
He prefers not to talk about Lior’s biological father.
“Adelina was pregnant when she came (home). We were going through a difficult time,” recalls Adenir Corrêa Rufino, Déne, Adelina’s younger sister, who was 14 years old at the time.
In a conversation, Adelina’s father said that it would be better for her to give Leandro to a family that could educate him.
“You can’t raise this child, what are you going to do?” Adelina says, remembering her father’s words.
“I can’t take care of you, your mother is gone. What happens if the child dies of hunger?” asked his father.
Adelina’s first two children, a girl and a boy, were also put up for adoption. She didn’t want to do it again, but she agreed.
“In the maternity ward they told me that I would not keep the child,” she says.
Adelina remembers the only time she had contact with Leandro: “They took him out of his crib, very skinny and without clothes. I never saw him again”.
She says she never breastfed him. Leandro was handed over to a nurse who would take him to his new family.
What Adelina and her family did not know was that mafias operated in Santa Catarina that seduced young and vulnerable mothers, with no prospects of supporting their children, to convince them to give up their children.
These groups sold children for prices that reached US$40,000, in figures at the time, for adoptions abroad.
Judges, lawyers, doctors and nurses participated in the lucrative plan. The targets were mainly women from southern Brazil, because the demand for light-skinned, blue-eyed babies was high.
“We thought he would go to a good family and that he would surely be here in Joinville, near us, or even in Brazil,” says Déne.
“We never thought they would take him to another country.”
Israel was the main destination for more than 3,000 babies who were trafficked from Brazil thanks to loopholes in adoption laws in the 1980s, according to estimates by the Federal Police (PF).
Testimonies from Israeli couples contacted by the PF indicated that news spread in their country that it was easier to adopt children in Brazil.
Leandro arrived at the Tel Aviv airport when he was 20 days old. He was given to his adoptive parents, Abraham and Tova Vilk, who named him Lior.
Accompanied by two security guards, the woman who introduced herself to Abraham as the connection for the “Brazilian adoptions” received $5,000 at the exchange rate at the time.
The adoptive parents later told their son that they thought the money would be used to cover the boy’s travel expenses to Israel and that they were not aware of any illegal plans.
The adoptive family claims that Lior was given away by a woman who years later was convicted of participating in the illegal adoption scheme, although not for the specific case of Adelina’s son.
The discovery
Lior found out he was adopted at age 6, when he overheard a friend’s mother say he wasn’t Tova’s biological son.
“You are not my mother!” Lior told Tova days later to confront her.
He remembers that she consoled him by stroking his hair and saying: “My son, you have two mothers: one who gave birth to you and another who raised you.”
Lior grew up knowing her history, but it wasn’t until she was 14 that she wanted to know more about her biological family.
He says that his adoptive parents always supported him in that search: they told him everything they knew about the adoption and gave him his Brazilian documents.
“I didn’t speak Portuguese, but after reading that my biological mother’s name was Izabela Alves dos Santos, there was no turning back,” says Lior.
“It’s a feeling that never leaves you.”
Determined to discover his origins, Lior wanted to know more about Brazil.
He made a friend at the coffee shop where he worked. That’s when she first heard about Brazilian children being trafficked to Israel.
Between 1984 and 1988, accusations of trafficking in Brazilian babies made the front pages of newspapers in Brazil and abroad.
Lior’s friend from the cafeteria knew it was one of these cases. “He was adopted illegally. He had already been to Brazil and knew how to ask for help,” he recalls.
“When he saw my documents, he told me: ‘Lior, there is no way to locate them, I think it’s all fake’”.
The search
The Lior pilgrimage began in 2007. He contacted groups in Curitiba online, where he believed he was born because it was the city that appeared in his documents.
Through the now-defunct Orkut, the most popular social network in Brazil at the time, he met people who were moved by his story.
Through them she discovered the Brazilian Association of the Disappeared, which at the time was a website created by Amanda Boldeke* to find her brother.
Lior began a long search, with many advances and disappointments.
Amanda was a bond between mothers and children separated by international human trafficking.
On his portal, he shared stories of illegally adopted young people and research on the history of child trafficking and illegal adoptions in Brazil.
Emails and requests for help began to arrive for Amanda. Her first contact with Lior was in 2009.
“He was a young man who knew nothing about Brazil, I didn’t speak Portuguese yet and everything had to be translated,” says Amanda.
“To understand its history I had to search in libraries, in newspapers from 30 years ago. “There was nothing on the internet.”
On old, yellowed pages, a gigantic network of illegal baby trafficking in Brazil was drawn before Amanda’s eyes.
At least four baby trafficking gangs were arrested in Santa Catarina in the 1980s.
“All the data of Lior and other young people like him were falsified, rendering the investigations and searches for the alleged mother that appeared in the documents null and void. However, he never gave up,” says Amanda.
“I followed every moment of their struggle, the frustrations, the discouragement, the achievements, the determination. Lior is an example for all of us”, it states.
A DNA bank
A report in Israel about adopted young people of various nationalities living in the country caught the attention of those responsible for My Heritage, a DNA bank with an online genealogy platform.
About 92 million users in 42 languages have generated more than 35 million family trees and can search more than 9 billion global historical records.
My Heritage has a project, DNA Quest, that offers free genetic testing kits to adopted people or those looking for adoptive relatives.a tool that has led to reunions around the world.
Lior says he only felt ready to take the test after a while. He had already done others of this type, but none offered results in the search for his biological family.
However, two coincidences changed things this time. The first was the decision of Márcia**, a Brazilian living in Germany, to take a DNA test.
In 2018, Lior received an email from My Heritage congratulating him on finding a second cousin: Márcia.
A new DNA test revealed that Márcia’s father could be Lior’s great-uncle. With more tests and contacts, she and Lior reached another cousin, Rosa, who lived in Blumenau, another municipality in Santa Catarina.
The hypothesis then arose that Lior’s father was one of Rosa’s 13 siblings.
“Everyone had died except one. “He agreed to take the test, not because he thought I looked like him, but because he thought I looked like his ex-wife, Adelina,” Lior recalls.
But the test result was negative.
The second coincidence occurred when Juliana Alves, a Brazilian living in Italy, lost a bet with her husband and registered in the DNA bank.
In 2022, Lior received a new email from My Heritage that said Juliana was also her second cousin.
Lior wrote to him. Part of Juliana’s family was in Italy, but she was born in Joinville. She then passed Lior the names and contact information of her relatives.
With a list of possible relatives in hand, he asked his friends and Amanda from the Brazilian Association of the Disappeared for help finding addresses and names.
Reunion
Juliana’s relatives in Joinville began to be contacted by people who were helping Lior in the search.
It was then that Déne, Adelina’s sister, received a call from her sister-in-law and learned about Lior’s story.
Déne’s daughter, Emanuelle, 13, found Lior on social media and sent him a message.
“I looked up his name online and found his Instagram,” Emanuelle said.
It was Lior’s first contact with his maternal family. Shortly after he met his aunt.
“Lior started telling his story and everything fell into place. I had no doubt that he was my nephew,” Déne recalls.
In the following months, Lior grew closer to his family in Brazil from Israel. In conversation with Déne, she assured that her documents were false.
She told her date of birth to Déne, who remembered that Adelina went to the hospital on August 31, 1985 and gave birth on September 1, 1985.
“It was then that I discovered that my date of birth was the only true detail of my story.”says Lior.
“The photo is not mine, I am not from Curitiba, my mother’s name is not Izabela Alves dos Santos, but I was born on September 1, 1985.”
Lior discovered that his documents were forged in Rio de Janeiro.
“My passport has a stamp of departure from Brazil from Rio de Janeiro on September 17, 1985, at 11:45 p.m.”
After giving Lior up for adoption, Adelina stayed at her father’s house for a while, until she met her last husband, to whom she was married for 32 years.
She became estranged from her family during that period. She only got back in touch with her brothers after her husband died. She could no longer live alone due to her epilepsy.
“Once she fell, hurt herself and we had to take her to the hospital,” says Déne.
“So we held a meeting between the brothers and decided to admit her to a nursing home, where she would take the medications correctly, because at home she didn’t take them and sometimes she would have seizures.”
Déne says that she was careful not to reveal anything about Lior to Adelina before she was sure that he was indeed her sister’s son.
“We brought her home to collect saliva and do the DNA test. I didn’t want to create hope without being sure,” warns Déne.
“After the positive result, the whole family was excited about the story and wanted to meet Lior.”
A new life in Brazil
In Joinville square, Adelina smiled when talking to Lior that Saturday in July. I had long ago given up hope of finding him.
“I really enjoyed talking to him. Amen, Jesus, glory! Now everything is fine”.
For Lior, a new stage began after the long journey to meet his biological mother.
Shortly after, he discovered, through DNA tests, who his biological father was – now deceased – and maintains contact with his paternal family in the city of Blumenau.
He also decided that he wanted to live in Brazil and have his own business, a plan he developed in the years of waiting, when he saved and learned Portuguese.
To carry out the idea, he had to face one last obstacle: regularize his documents.
He needed a notary to recognize his birth certificate, which was not included in Brazilian records, since all the documents were false.
“I filed an administrative process through a lawyer who handles these actions,” he explains. “Only then did we get the civil registry to accept it and continue the process.”
Lior Vilk wants to live close to his family, especially Adelina. “I want to be able to follow his life more closely.”
*Amanda Boldeke is the mother of the journalist Mônica Foltran, author of this report.
**Name has been changed to protect his identity.
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