After almost seven decades living as part of an Arab family in Syria, a Jewish woman has returned home to Haifa.
Rachel Elkayam disappeared from Tel Aviv in 1947 aged 16. Her parents and siblings had no idea what happened to her. In actual fact, she had eloped with a Muslim man.
The marriage was short-lived, because he was killed by a sniper during Arab-Jewish clashes. But she could not return to her parents because by the time of his death she was pregnant with his baby, and her in-laws insisted she stayed with them. "His parents, they all went to Syria and took me," she recalled in a report shown on Israel's Channel 2. "I didn't want to go to Syria."
She was married to one of her late husband's brothers, who treated her violently, and dreamed of returning home, but with no way to do so. She once gave a letter to a German man who was travelling to Haifa telling her parents she was alive, but it never arrived. And so, until one of her grandchildren went to the Israeli embassy in London last year, she was presumed dead.
