JERUSALEM — Some Israeli families received army call-up papers and voter registration notices for children who had been declared dead as babies. Many others were never given an official cause of death by health officials, never saw the bodies of their infants and were never able to locate their graves.

For decades, about 1,000 families have lived with their doubts and a deep distrust of the authorities, suspecting a systematic scheme to abduct babies from families who immigrated to the newly established state of Israel from Yemen and other countries in the 1950s and give them up for adoption by childless couples from the Ashkenazi elite.

Many of the missing children had been admitted to clinics or hospitals after falling ill — often a result of poor sanitary conditions in the intake camps where their often-large families were initially housed — or were being looked after in day care centers. The overburdened immigrants and their offspring recall the authorities treating them with a highhanded disdain.

On Wednesday, the Israeli government made available online 200,000 previously classified documents from the state archives pertaining to the missing children. The hope was to shed light on a painful episode in the young country’s history and to try to help families answer lingering questions that three official commissions of inquiry since the 1960s had not resolved. The commissions concluded that there was no systematic abduction of children for adoption, and that most of them had simply died, but the families did not believe them.