תימנ'ע עסקנים/רשעים/משוגעים

MOTHER & CHILD REUNION

JERUSALEM — Twelve years after a Yemenite boy was spirited to New York by a Hasidic sect and then freed in a legal battle, he was reunited this week with his mother — at his graduation ceremony to become an Israeli border policeman.

Yehiel Nahari, who had become a symbol of the plight of Yemenite Jews, endured a strange odyssey — to Monroe, N.Y., then to a homeless shelter in Brooklyn and, finally, to the front lines of Israel's war against terror bombers.

When he was 3, Yehiel's heart-wrenching photo appeared in ads that were headlined, "Don't Forget Me," as part of the Jewish Agency's effort to bring Jews from Yemen to Israel.

After his father died when he was 7, his mother, Laora, was left with six children.

"The Satmar Hasidim promised her that her children would have a good education and took them to the United States," said Shlomo Gafi, a Yemenite Jew who has fought "to save Jews who were lured by the Satmars' false pretenses."

Yehiel was separated from a brother and sister who came to New York with him and forced to speak Yiddish and "to forget the Yemenite Jewish tradition and, when he revolted, was beaten and humiliated," Gafi told The Post.

At age 14, the boy fled the Satmars and Gafi found him in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn.

After a three-month battle for custody of Yehiel, Gafi brought the boy to Israel, to the home of another sister who had left Yemen.

Five years later, Yehiel volunteered for the border police and graduated this week as one of the best in his class of 85 cadets.

But he didn't know that his classmates, who had heard him speak longingly of his family in Yemen, had raised $2,000 to bring his mother from their town of Raida, about an hour and a half north of Yemen's capital, San'a.

At the end of his speech to the graduating class, border-police commander Hasin Fares said, "Now allow us something personal," and asked Yehiel to step forward.

He was stunned to see his mother walk toward him, in traditional Yemenite dress.

"I didn't believe it. I couldn't stop my tears," he said.

Laora Nahari embraced him for the first time in 12 years.

"Don't cry, my son," she told him. "One shouldn't see a soldier cry. Wait until he comes home."

IN SATMAR CUSTODY

In English, Hebrew, Yemenite and Yiddish with English subtitles. Running time: 70 minutes. Not rated (nothing objectionable). At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Third Street at Avenue A.

THE Israeli documentary "In Satmar Custody" is infuriating, but not for the reason filmmakers want it to be.

As the title suggests, the film is meant as a damning look at the Satmars, a sect of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews.

It sounds like an interesting subculture, but the filmmakers barely talk to Satmars and don't examine why they're against Israel.

Instead, the film focuses on a heart-rending story about a young couple who emigrated in the early 1990s from Yemen to the Satmars' community in Rockland County.

After one of the couple's six young children died in an accident, the local authorities accused the mother of child abuse, and their other children were taken away and placed with other Satmar families.

The movie's talking heads suggest that these anti-Zionist Satmars are villains - baby stealers, in fact.

But judging from the evidence presented, there's no reason to think the Satmars are at fault. If the parents have a beef, it would seem that it's with the Rockland child-welfare system.

It makes you wonder what the film's real agenda is.