Israel – In the latest chapter of a life lived as if it were a script from a Hollywood movie, an 85 year-old great grandmother has returned home to her Jewish family in Israel after living her entire adult life as a Arab woman in Syria.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Israel’s Ch. 2 news (http://goo.gl/ubb4Dy) reports that octogenarian Rachel Elkayam was reunited with loved ones on December 8 courtesy of a complex series of diplomatic maneuvers that included three countries.
Ms. Elkayam’s saga dates back to 1947 when as a 16 year-old girl living in Haifa, she fell in love with an Arab boy named Fuad.
Following a strategic move by her family to Tel Aviv as escalating tensions surrounding Israel’s move for independence heightened, Elkayam secretly returned to Haifa to marry Fuad.
From the day Rachel disappeared from Tel Aviv, her family presumed she had been killed.
A short time later Fuad was killed by sniper fire, after which Rachel—then pregnant with a son—fled to Syria with Fuad’s family where she lived out her entire adult life.
Always hoping to return one day to Israel and her Jewish faith, Rachel’s dream was realized after one of her grandsons explained to a staffer at the Israeli Embassy in London that his Syrian grandmother was really an Israeli Jew form Haifa.
Too much is missing in this story. How and why did her grandson get to Israel and she didn’t? Were her children raised as Arabs? If they were then it is doubtful that they would be able to make their way to Israel. Did she remarry? This could be an interesting article if the missing parts were filled in.
#1
your questions show that you are not very versed in the English language
Her son got the attention of someone at the London embassy and was not in Israel
from the rest of your questions it seems that you are just a skeptic with an agenda to try and make light of this extraordinary story that the writer may have left out some details due to lack of details or for other reasons they did not mention
your mocking skepticism is just showing your lack of compassion and complete disregard to anything that is not part of your “shtettle news”