Dana El-Kurd

One of those neighborhoods where Arab Jews were placed later birthed the Israeli Black Panthers.

And then the western side was under Israeli rule and Palestinians on the eastern side of the city fell under Jordanian rule.

And later, when Israel occupied the rest of Jerusalem and the city was unified, my great-grandmother did go looking for her children, but my grandfather didn't connect with her, so her son, and moved to Jordan.

Now, from my mother, I also pressed for more information.

She had never told me any of this story.

But this year, literally a few weeks ago, she finally gave me Rachel's last name.

I dug around to see what I could find out about her.

I asked online.

I got the help of people who had expertise in Jewish genealogy.

And what I found was a much more complicated picture.

First, I found an academic article about a, quote, nonpartisan Zionist youth group in Belgium in the 1920s and 1930s.

I don't speak Hebrew, so I'm going to mispronounce this.

That's what this article was about.

They were nonpartisan in the sense that they included a lot of different strains of Zionism.

So right-wing Zionism, left-wing Zionism among the members.

But the Zionism itself, of course, was taken as a given.

Now, the article included quotes from former members of this group and kind of grainy black and white photos of which the name Rachel appeared in the captions with her last name.

And when I first saw the woman identified as Rachel in this group photo, I knew instinctively that I had found her because she looked like a blonde version of my mother.

My intuition was very quickly confirmed because Rachel was identified by her married Palestinian name in the footnotes where she was quoted.

So I found her.