Gilad Shalit Will Lead Aliyah Flight From U.S.
Gilad Shalit will accompany a flight of new immigrants, including 106 children, leaving New York for Israel on Monday.
The former captive soldier will be onboard the first chartered El Al aliyah flight of the summer, which will leave John F. Kennedy Airport with 231 new immigrants, including 41 families.
A live feed of the immigrants landing in Israel, at 7 A.M. Tuesday, and the welcoming ceremony will be available at the Nefesh B’Nefesh website.
Some 990 children are scheduled to make aliyah this year, according to Nefesh B’Nefesh, a 20 percent increase over last year.
Last month, Hamas posted a video showing Shalit preparing to be released.
The 38-second video posted to the Internet showed Shalit buttoning a new shirt, tying his shoes and getting out of his chair flanked by Hamas operatives.
The video also shows photos of other Israelis kidnapped and killed by Hamas and ends with the words, in Arabic, “We started to achieve the goal, and we will reach the end.”
The video was prepared by the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
Shalit was the only member of a three-man crew who survived a cross-border attack on June 25, 2006 by armed Palestinians who captured him and hid him in Gaza. He was released in a 2011 deal with Hamas in exchange for 1,027 prisoners, many of them convicted terrorists responsible for killing Israelis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO