Immigrant family’s tragic end
They came from America 10 years ago; Tuesday, mother and children committed suicide
Ten years ago, Ruth Arav (82) immigrated to Israel with her two children, Morris (49) and Rachel (48), both single with no children.
On Tuesday, the three were in a car when it collided with a fast train. The mother was severely wounded, her son and daughter survived, but continued on with the plan: They wondered in nearby fields, found a high electricity poll, climbed it, and electrocuted themselves to death.
At first, police thought the brother and sister died in the accident and flew out of the car, but findings at the scene painted a different picture.
'They didn't really communicate with us'
They came from North America, and since their arrival in Israel, remained "glued" to one another, and were described as inseparable. They always treated their neighbors kindly and generously, but these relations were always weak and shallow.
They didn't have real friends, and no one knows much about the three.
"I was a journalist abroad," Rachel told a neighbor, when the family lived in a Hadera highrise building.
"They were together all the time," said neighbors. "They would travel for kilometers on foot with backpacks, and it looked like they went nowhere. They seemed to wonder without aim. They would smile at us a lot, but they seemed strange and unsettled. We never saw them host anyone, not family, not friends, it was just the three of them, together," added the neighbor.
Neighbors also said that the Arav family spoke mainly English, and that Rachel would sometimes hold private English lessons, in addition to working at a college as an English teacher.
"They didn't really communicate with us," said one neighbor.
“As far as we know, the mother and son didn’t work at all, and I don’t know what they were living off,” former neighbor Bat-Sheva Barami said.
Israel Moskovitz contributed to the report
