JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
ISAIAH 31:5
5 As birds flying,(WAR PLANES WITH BOMBS) so will the LORD of hosts defend Jerusalem;(WITH PLANES) defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.(NUKE OR BOMB ISRAELS ENEMIES)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(disolved from atomic bomb) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(disolved from atomic bomb) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(disolved from atomic bomb)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)
ZECHARIAH 14:1-4 King James Bible
1 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.
2 For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
3 Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.
4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
Israeli jets strike Gaza after rocket attack-Army says it targeted 2 Hamas posts in the Strip, hours after projectile explodes in south of country-By Judah Ari Gross and Times of Israel staff December 14, 2015, 1:06 am
Israeli aircraft struck in the Gaza Strip Sunday night, hours after a rocket fired from the territory exploded in Israel.The army said it targeted two Hamas military posts in northern and central Gaza. There were no immediate reports of Palestinian casualties.The IDF noted that it holds Hamas rulers responsible for any attacks emanating from the Strip.The rocket prompted air-raid sirens in multiple communities in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, the IDF said. Residents of Sha’ar HaNegev, a group of communities bordering the Gaza Strip, said they heard a loud explosion, but no injuries or damage were reported.The military said the rocket landed in an open area.Israel regularly carries out limited air strikes on Hamas targets in response to sporadic rocket-fire, though it is believed that the rockets are fired by fringe groups inside Gaza, rather than by Hamas.The latest attack came as Hamas demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for information on the fate of two IDF soldiers declared killed in action during last summer’s Gaza war.
Gaza rocket strikes southern Israel; no injuries or damage-Residents of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council report hearing a loud ‘boom’; IDF troops launch search of the area-By Judah Ari Gross December 13, 2015, 8:34 pm
A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck southern Israel on Sunday night, as air-raid sirens sounded in multiple communities in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, the IDF said.Residents of Sha’ar HaNegev, a group of communities bordering the Gaza Strip, said they heard a loud “boom,” but no injuries or damage were reported.The Israel Defense Forces said that the rocket had landed in an open area. Israeli troops were searching the area, the army said.Last month, a rocket fired from Gaza also struck an open field in the Sha’ar Hanegev area. In response, the Israeli Air Force struck multiple Hamas outposts in the Strip.The rocket strike comes as Hamas demands the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for information on the fate of two IDF soldiers declared killed in action during last summer’s Gaza war.
Israel redeploys guards to protect Jerusalem buses, trains-In light of ongoing terror threat, Transportation Ministry arms 300 ex-soldiers, allows them to conduct searches-By Times of Israel staff December 13, 2015, 11:20 pm
As a result of the ongoing threat of terrorism in the nation’s capital, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz on Sunday approved the deployment of 300 additional security guards for Jerusalem’s public transport, the Maariv news site reported.The guards and a number of security vehicles will be sent out to bus stops and Jerusalem Light Rail stops throughout the city. “The very deployment and correct use of the guards can bring the threat to a minimum and even prevent it,” Katz said.In the first few weeks of the ongoing violence, a similar group of guards and IDF soldiers were sent to protect Jerusalem’s public transportation system, but they were eventually taken off that duty. Now, however, they will return.The guards, all former combat soldiers, will be given uniforms, pistols and radios in order to protect passengers. They will also be given legal permission to conduct searches of those they determine to be potential security risks.In October, soon after the start of the ongoing violence, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan approved an expanded “stop and frisk” policy to allow law-enforcement officials the ability to carry out searches at just the slightest suspicion of a threat.The plan was approved by the security cabinet in light of the ongoing terror, which has been predominantly centered around Jerusalem and the West Bank.“Your mission is to act with determination and responsibility,” Katz told the guards. “On the one hand to be determined in order to prevent, in any way, injury or threat to travelers on public transportation. But on the other hand, to act responsibly.”In addition, the Israel Defense Forces will maintain its increased presence in the West Bank, keeping four additional battalions in the area, according to Channel 2’s website.
ISRAEL SATAN COMES AGAINST
1 CHRONICLES 21:1
1 And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.
GENESIS 12:1-3
1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I (GOD) will shew thee:
2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3 And I will bless them that bless thee,(ISRAELIS) and curse (DESTROY) him that curseth thee:(DESTROY THEM) and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
ISAIAH 41:11
11 Behold, all they that were incensed against thee (ISRAEL) shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing;(DESTROYED) and they that strive with thee shall perish.(ISRAEL HATERS WILL BE TOTALLY DESTROYED)
ISRAELS TROUBLE
JEREMIAH 30:7
7 Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble;(ISRAEL) but he shall be saved out of it.
DANIEL 12:1,4
1 And at that time shall Michael(ISRAELS WAR ANGEL) stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people:(ISRAEL) and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation(May 14,48) even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.
4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro,(WORLD TRAVEL,IMMIGRATION) and knowledge shall be increased.(COMPUTERS,CHIP IMPLANTS ETC)
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
Iran ‘examining’ possible successors to Khamenei-Council tasked with appointing Islamic republic’s next supreme leader is already looking at options, top politician says-By Times of Israel staff December 14, 2015, 2:37 am
Iran has begun looking for a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a top Iranian official said Sunday.In comments translated by Reuters, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told the country’s ILNA news agency that the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for electing the Islamic republic’s supreme leader, “will act when a new leader needs to be appointed. They are preparing for that now and are examining the options.”He added: “They have appointed a group to list the qualified people that will be put to a vote when an incident happens.”Rafsanjani also noted that the Assembly may elect “a council of leaders if needed,” as opposed to a single ruler.Officially comprised of 86 religious figures elected by the people, the Assembly of Experts chooses the supreme leader and monitors his actions.The clerical body grants the leader, currently Khamenei, an indefinite term but it retains the power to sack him, if it sees fit.Elections to the council are held approximately every 10 years, with the next round scheduled for February 2016. The run-up to the election has seen tensions between Iran’s conservative and moderate leaders, with hardliners recently cracking down on activists, journalists and artists in what some view as an effort to curb the influence of moderate President Hassan Rouhani.“The hardliners are wary of Rouhani’s influence at home and abroad. They fear it may harm the balance of power in Iran,” an anonymous senior official close to Rouhani told Reuters in November.Should Rouhani’s faction win in the February elections for the council in charge of selecting the supreme leader, it would empower reform-minded leaders.AFP and AP contributed to this report.
After 68 years, a Syrian great-grandmother comes home… to her Jewish family in Israel-She was 16 when she disappeared from pre-state Israel, and had been assumed dead. This week, Rachel Elkayam was reunited with her relatives, closing a heart-wrenching circle-By Times of Israel staff December 11, 2015, 10:47 pm
Sixty-eight years after she last saw her family, an 85-year-old, silver-haired, Jewish great-grandmother returned home to Haifa in northern Israel this week — having spent her entire adult life living as an Arab woman in the neighboring enemy state of Syria.Rachel Elkayam, the third of 10 children, was a 16-year-old girl living in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Haifa in 1947 when her parents moved the family to Tel Aviv. Conflict between pre-state Israel and the Arab world was escalating, ahead of the following year’s declaration of Israeli independence and the full-scale war that then erupted, and the Elkayams believed they would be safer in the center of Israel than the north. But Rachel, a rebellious child, had fallen in love with one of her Arab neighbors, Fuad, and was pregnant with his child. “I loved him, and he loved me,” Rachel Elkayam told Israel’s Channel 2 news in a report on her remarkable life story, broadcast on Friday night. Fuad’s family came to Tel Aviv to find her, and she went back to Haifa with them, and married her young love in a ceremony that she kept secret from her parents. In fact, from the day she disappeared in Tel Aviv, the family never knew what had befallen her, and always presumed that she was dead.What actually happened was complicated, heart-wrenching, and almost defies belief. Not long after their secret marriage, Fuad was shot in the streets of Haifa by a sniper — “I never saw him again,” said Rachel — and he died in a local hospital. Her parents-in-law decided to flee Israel, for Syria, and insisted that she come with them; she was, after all, carrying their grandson in her womb. “I didn’t want to go,” Elkayam recalled tearfully, in the mixture of Arabic and halting Hebrew with which she spoke throughout the report.Later, in Syria, Fuad’s family told her she could leave if she wanted to, but without her son. “I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I loved the child.”And so she stayed in Syria — a Jewish mother, with her Jewish child, as part of her new Arab family. The family then married her to one of Fuad’s brothers, and she had eight children in total over the years. When she and her second husband would fight, she confided gleefully in the TV interview, “I would curse him in Hebrew: ‘Kiss my butt.'” She’d also call other members of the family “a bunch of old shoes” in Hebrew, she said. It was a small pleasure, she smiled, to be able to insult them in a language they couldn’t understand.Elkayam said she “always wanted to come back, but I couldn’t” and that she had tried to at least establish contact with her family in Israel — a difficult task given the relentless hostilities between the two countries. She once gave a visitor from Germany, who said he was eventually traveling on to Israel, a note to her parents assuring them that she was alive and well, but it was apparently never delivered. Her parents passed away assuming she had died, never knowing that she had become a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother just a few hours’ impossible drive away — across the northern border.When major wars broke out — notably in 1967 and 1973, she said — she would secretly listen to Israel Radio on a transistor, praying not to hear the name “Elkayam” read out among the dead. As a minor act of defiance, she also kept her personal phone book updated in Hebrew.She would have died in Syria, her story never known to her family in Israel, were it not for the actions of one of her grandsons. In London last year, he went to the Israeli Embassy and told a staffer that his grandmother in Syria had told him that she was actually an Israeli Jew from Haifa. And so it was that Geula Elkayam, one of Rachel’s siblings, received a phone call from London asking her if she had a sister named Rachel.This past Tuesday, December 8, Rachel Elkayam, now 85, was flown to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, via a third country and by means of an undoubtedly highly complex and sensitive diplomatic process. Waiting in the arrivals hall were members of her family, some of whom she had not seen for 68 years, others whom she had never seen at all. They cried over her as she was pushed out to them in a wheelchair, and wrapped her in an Israeli flag, which she kissed.Then they drove her home to Haifa, where her brother Amnon, 71, a toddler when she disappeared, took her on a small tour of the neighborhood and the city. She visited her parents’ graves, and was wheeled to the view she said she most wanted to see, of the Mediterranean coast — with Syria, where she had spent her life, to the north.When major wars broke out — notably in 1967 and 1973 — she would secretly listen to Israel Radio on a transistor, praying not to hear the names of her relatives read out among the dead-The TV report ended with a scene of Rachel and her old-new family together in Haifa celebrating this week’s Hanukkah — the Jewish festival of lights, a festival also resonant with tales of triumph over the odds. Soon Elkayam plans to travel to Europe, where some of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren live.The report, understandably, did not specify where she had lived in Syria, under what name, or whether any of her children and descendants still live there. It also did not detail how she got to Israel, beyond acknowledging the help of the Haifa municipality, the Israeli Interior Ministry, and the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, which is centrally involved in Israel’s relations with Diaspora Jews.Rachel Elkayam, the report said, has already re-registered as an Israeli citizen and been given her new Israeli identity card. The clerk at the Interior Ministry had assumed, speaking to her, that she was a Muslim, the report said. She had proved that she was a Jew by reciting the first words of the Shema, the central Jewish prayer: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
ISAIAH 31:5
5 As birds flying,(WAR PLANES WITH BOMBS) so will the LORD of hosts defend Jerusalem;(WITH PLANES) defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it.(NUKE OR BOMB ISRAELS ENEMIES)
ZECHARIAH 14:12-13
12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet,(disolved from atomic bomb) and their eyes shall consume away in their holes,(disolved from atomic bomb) and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.(disolved from atomic bomb)
13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of his neighbour.(1/2-3 BILLION DIE IN WW3)
ZECHARIAH 14:1-4 King James Bible
1 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.
2 For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
3 Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.
4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
Israeli jets strike Gaza after rocket attack-Army says it targeted 2 Hamas posts in the Strip, hours after projectile explodes in south of country-By Judah Ari Gross and Times of Israel staff December 14, 2015, 1:06 am
Israeli aircraft struck in the Gaza Strip Sunday night, hours after a rocket fired from the territory exploded in Israel.The army said it targeted two Hamas military posts in northern and central Gaza. There were no immediate reports of Palestinian casualties.The IDF noted that it holds Hamas rulers responsible for any attacks emanating from the Strip.The rocket prompted air-raid sirens in multiple communities in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, the IDF said. Residents of Sha’ar HaNegev, a group of communities bordering the Gaza Strip, said they heard a loud explosion, but no injuries or damage were reported.The military said the rocket landed in an open area.Israel regularly carries out limited air strikes on Hamas targets in response to sporadic rocket-fire, though it is believed that the rockets are fired by fringe groups inside Gaza, rather than by Hamas.The latest attack came as Hamas demanded the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for information on the fate of two IDF soldiers declared killed in action during last summer’s Gaza war.
Gaza rocket strikes southern Israel; no injuries or damage-Residents of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council report hearing a loud ‘boom’; IDF troops launch search of the area-By Judah Ari Gross December 13, 2015, 8:34 pm
A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck southern Israel on Sunday night, as air-raid sirens sounded in multiple communities in the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, the IDF said.Residents of Sha’ar HaNegev, a group of communities bordering the Gaza Strip, said they heard a loud “boom,” but no injuries or damage were reported.The Israel Defense Forces said that the rocket had landed in an open area. Israeli troops were searching the area, the army said.Last month, a rocket fired from Gaza also struck an open field in the Sha’ar Hanegev area. In response, the Israeli Air Force struck multiple Hamas outposts in the Strip.The rocket strike comes as Hamas demands the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails in exchange for information on the fate of two IDF soldiers declared killed in action during last summer’s Gaza war.
Israel redeploys guards to protect Jerusalem buses, trains-In light of ongoing terror threat, Transportation Ministry arms 300 ex-soldiers, allows them to conduct searches-By Times of Israel staff December 13, 2015, 11:20 pm
As a result of the ongoing threat of terrorism in the nation’s capital, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz on Sunday approved the deployment of 300 additional security guards for Jerusalem’s public transport, the Maariv news site reported.The guards and a number of security vehicles will be sent out to bus stops and Jerusalem Light Rail stops throughout the city. “The very deployment and correct use of the guards can bring the threat to a minimum and even prevent it,” Katz said.In the first few weeks of the ongoing violence, a similar group of guards and IDF soldiers were sent to protect Jerusalem’s public transportation system, but they were eventually taken off that duty. Now, however, they will return.The guards, all former combat soldiers, will be given uniforms, pistols and radios in order to protect passengers. They will also be given legal permission to conduct searches of those they determine to be potential security risks.In October, soon after the start of the ongoing violence, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan approved an expanded “stop and frisk” policy to allow law-enforcement officials the ability to carry out searches at just the slightest suspicion of a threat.The plan was approved by the security cabinet in light of the ongoing terror, which has been predominantly centered around Jerusalem and the West Bank.“Your mission is to act with determination and responsibility,” Katz told the guards. “On the one hand to be determined in order to prevent, in any way, injury or threat to travelers on public transportation. But on the other hand, to act responsibly.”In addition, the Israel Defense Forces will maintain its increased presence in the West Bank, keeping four additional battalions in the area, according to Channel 2’s website.
ISRAEL SATAN COMES AGAINST
1 CHRONICLES 21:1
1 And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.
GENESIS 12:1-3
1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I (GOD) will shew thee:
2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3 And I will bless them that bless thee,(ISRAELIS) and curse (DESTROY) him that curseth thee:(DESTROY THEM) and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
ISAIAH 41:11
11 Behold, all they that were incensed against thee (ISRAEL) shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing;(DESTROYED) and they that strive with thee shall perish.(ISRAEL HATERS WILL BE TOTALLY DESTROYED)
ISRAELS TROUBLE
JEREMIAH 30:7
7 Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble;(ISRAEL) but he shall be saved out of it.
DANIEL 12:1,4
1 And at that time shall Michael(ISRAELS WAR ANGEL) stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people:(ISRAEL) and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation(May 14,48) even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.
4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro,(WORLD TRAVEL,IMMIGRATION) and knowledge shall be increased.(COMPUTERS,CHIP IMPLANTS ETC)
And here are the bounderies of the land that Israel will inherit either through war or peace or God in the future. God says its Israels land and only Israels land. They will have every inch God promised them of this land in the future.
Egypt east of the Nile River, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, The southern part of Turkey and the Western Half of Iraq west of the Euphrates. Gen 13:14-15, Psm 105:9,11, Gen 15:18, Exe 23:31, Num 34:1-12, Josh 1:4.ALL THIS LAND ISRAEL WILL DEFINATELY OWN IN THE FUTURE, ITS ISRAELS NOT ISHMAELS LAND.12 TRIBES INHERIT LAND IN THE FUTURE
Iran ‘examining’ possible successors to Khamenei-Council tasked with appointing Islamic republic’s next supreme leader is already looking at options, top politician says-By Times of Israel staff December 14, 2015, 2:37 am
Iran has begun looking for a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a top Iranian official said Sunday.In comments translated by Reuters, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told the country’s ILNA news agency that the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for electing the Islamic republic’s supreme leader, “will act when a new leader needs to be appointed. They are preparing for that now and are examining the options.”He added: “They have appointed a group to list the qualified people that will be put to a vote when an incident happens.”Rafsanjani also noted that the Assembly may elect “a council of leaders if needed,” as opposed to a single ruler.Officially comprised of 86 religious figures elected by the people, the Assembly of Experts chooses the supreme leader and monitors his actions.The clerical body grants the leader, currently Khamenei, an indefinite term but it retains the power to sack him, if it sees fit.Elections to the council are held approximately every 10 years, with the next round scheduled for February 2016. The run-up to the election has seen tensions between Iran’s conservative and moderate leaders, with hardliners recently cracking down on activists, journalists and artists in what some view as an effort to curb the influence of moderate President Hassan Rouhani.“The hardliners are wary of Rouhani’s influence at home and abroad. They fear it may harm the balance of power in Iran,” an anonymous senior official close to Rouhani told Reuters in November.Should Rouhani’s faction win in the February elections for the council in charge of selecting the supreme leader, it would empower reform-minded leaders.AFP and AP contributed to this report.
After 68 years, a Syrian great-grandmother comes home… to her Jewish family in Israel-She was 16 when she disappeared from pre-state Israel, and had been assumed dead. This week, Rachel Elkayam was reunited with her relatives, closing a heart-wrenching circle-By Times of Israel staff December 11, 2015, 10:47 pm
Sixty-eight years after she last saw her family, an 85-year-old, silver-haired, Jewish great-grandmother returned home to Haifa in northern Israel this week — having spent her entire adult life living as an Arab woman in the neighboring enemy state of Syria.Rachel Elkayam, the third of 10 children, was a 16-year-old girl living in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Haifa in 1947 when her parents moved the family to Tel Aviv. Conflict between pre-state Israel and the Arab world was escalating, ahead of the following year’s declaration of Israeli independence and the full-scale war that then erupted, and the Elkayams believed they would be safer in the center of Israel than the north. But Rachel, a rebellious child, had fallen in love with one of her Arab neighbors, Fuad, and was pregnant with his child. “I loved him, and he loved me,” Rachel Elkayam told Israel’s Channel 2 news in a report on her remarkable life story, broadcast on Friday night. Fuad’s family came to Tel Aviv to find her, and she went back to Haifa with them, and married her young love in a ceremony that she kept secret from her parents. In fact, from the day she disappeared in Tel Aviv, the family never knew what had befallen her, and always presumed that she was dead.What actually happened was complicated, heart-wrenching, and almost defies belief. Not long after their secret marriage, Fuad was shot in the streets of Haifa by a sniper — “I never saw him again,” said Rachel — and he died in a local hospital. Her parents-in-law decided to flee Israel, for Syria, and insisted that she come with them; she was, after all, carrying their grandson in her womb. “I didn’t want to go,” Elkayam recalled tearfully, in the mixture of Arabic and halting Hebrew with which she spoke throughout the report.Later, in Syria, Fuad’s family told her she could leave if she wanted to, but without her son. “I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I loved the child.”And so she stayed in Syria — a Jewish mother, with her Jewish child, as part of her new Arab family. The family then married her to one of Fuad’s brothers, and she had eight children in total over the years. When she and her second husband would fight, she confided gleefully in the TV interview, “I would curse him in Hebrew: ‘Kiss my butt.'” She’d also call other members of the family “a bunch of old shoes” in Hebrew, she said. It was a small pleasure, she smiled, to be able to insult them in a language they couldn’t understand.Elkayam said she “always wanted to come back, but I couldn’t” and that she had tried to at least establish contact with her family in Israel — a difficult task given the relentless hostilities between the two countries. She once gave a visitor from Germany, who said he was eventually traveling on to Israel, a note to her parents assuring them that she was alive and well, but it was apparently never delivered. Her parents passed away assuming she had died, never knowing that she had become a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother just a few hours’ impossible drive away — across the northern border.When major wars broke out — notably in 1967 and 1973, she said — she would secretly listen to Israel Radio on a transistor, praying not to hear the name “Elkayam” read out among the dead. As a minor act of defiance, she also kept her personal phone book updated in Hebrew.She would have died in Syria, her story never known to her family in Israel, were it not for the actions of one of her grandsons. In London last year, he went to the Israeli Embassy and told a staffer that his grandmother in Syria had told him that she was actually an Israeli Jew from Haifa. And so it was that Geula Elkayam, one of Rachel’s siblings, received a phone call from London asking her if she had a sister named Rachel.This past Tuesday, December 8, Rachel Elkayam, now 85, was flown to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, via a third country and by means of an undoubtedly highly complex and sensitive diplomatic process. Waiting in the arrivals hall were members of her family, some of whom she had not seen for 68 years, others whom she had never seen at all. They cried over her as she was pushed out to them in a wheelchair, and wrapped her in an Israeli flag, which she kissed.Then they drove her home to Haifa, where her brother Amnon, 71, a toddler when she disappeared, took her on a small tour of the neighborhood and the city. She visited her parents’ graves, and was wheeled to the view she said she most wanted to see, of the Mediterranean coast — with Syria, where she had spent her life, to the north.When major wars broke out — notably in 1967 and 1973 — she would secretly listen to Israel Radio on a transistor, praying not to hear the names of her relatives read out among the dead-The TV report ended with a scene of Rachel and her old-new family together in Haifa celebrating this week’s Hanukkah — the Jewish festival of lights, a festival also resonant with tales of triumph over the odds. Soon Elkayam plans to travel to Europe, where some of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren live.The report, understandably, did not specify where she had lived in Syria, under what name, or whether any of her children and descendants still live there. It also did not detail how she got to Israel, beyond acknowledging the help of the Haifa municipality, the Israeli Interior Ministry, and the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, which is centrally involved in Israel’s relations with Diaspora Jews.Rachel Elkayam, the report said, has already re-registered as an Israeli citizen and been given her new Israeli identity card. The clerk at the Interior Ministry had assumed, speaking to her, that she was a Muslim, the report said. She had proved that she was a Jew by reciting the first words of the Shema, the central Jewish prayer: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
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