A now-elderly Jewish woman will soon be reunited with her long-lost brothers and sisters, 55 years after she was kidnapped by an Arab neighbor and "disappeared off the face of the earth."
Hanna Menasche, then a 21-year-old Iraqi Jewess, was married to a Jewish man and the couple was preparing to move to Israel with her parents and seven siblings at the time of the abduction, according to a report published Thursday in Ynet.
Her kidnapper, enamored of her, forced her to convert to Islam and to raise his children. After his death she fled Iraq, making her way to an Israeli consulate in Europe where she told her story. She is expected to arrive shortly in Israel to be with her family, although her parents are no longer alive to greet her.