Photo Credit: ZAKA
ZAKA ambulance in Ben-Gurion airport

(JNi.media) This was not a pre-Halloween hoax: the family members of an elderly woman who passed away shipped her body to Israel without attaching any relevant documents, baffling Israeli authorities, until ZAKA, an association of voluntary community emergency response teams in Israel, discovered she was an 80-year-old Russian who wanted to be buried in Israel.

The cargo crew at Ben Gurion International Airport, working the graveyard shift early Wednesday, discovered the body of an unidentified woman packed in a cardboard box when unloading a plane that arrived in Israel from Russia. Foreign Ministry officials summoned ZAKA volunteers to the airport, to help locate the deceased’s family.

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ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav said in a statement: “I got a call at night from the Department of Israelis in the Foreign Ministry, regarding packaged cargo on a plane that arrived from Moscow—with a woman’s body inside and without any accompanying document attesting to the identity of the deceased or the sender, as well as the necessary certifications.”

After hours of intense activity by ZAKA, assisted by the commander of ZAKA in Russia, Shaye Deitch, it turned out that the deceased was the late Esther Zizova, who passed away at the age of 80 11 days earlier. Further investigation revealed that the deceased had asked in her will to be buried in Israel, but her family was not familiar with the process of transferring a body, and so they packed her up and sent her via regular package shipping.

With the assistance of the Foreign Ministry, the required documents obtained after the fact, and the deceased will be taken for burial at the cemetery in Ashdod.

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