Two Israeli couples died in the crash of a TWA airliner off Greece yesterday which took the lives of all 88 persons aboard. The Israeli victims were identified as Ben Zion Shai, 30, his wife Elisheva, 27, and Dr. Richard Katzman, 36 and his wife, Alida, whose age was not given.
The Katzmans, the parents of three children, were not immediately identified as Israelis because they held American as well as Israeli passports. They settled a year ago at Rehovoth where Dr. Katzman was employed as a biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His wife was employed by the Absorption Ministry at Ben Gurion Airport where she helped process new immigrants. The couple planned to return permanently to the United States and therefore had sent their children, John, 10, Aggie, 9, and Tony, 5, to Los Angeles several weeks ago to enroll in school.
Ben Zion (Barry) Shai was born in Canada and grew up in Uruguay. He settled in Israel 12 years ago and married his wife who was a sabra. The couple had two children, aged 6 and 4. Shai, who owned a shoe moulds workshop was travelling to Europe with his wife on business. They had planned to continue on to Canada to visit relatives.
The Boeing 707 jet took off from Ben Gurion Airport yesterday morning on a flight to Athens, Rome, New York and Los Angeles with 105 persons aboard. Most of the passengers who embarked at Ben Gurion left the plane at Athens where 35 new passengers joined the flight. The plane went down in the Ionian Sea shortly after leaving Athens Airport. A report from Athens today said the pilot of the TWA jet had radioed that an engine failed just before Athens Airport lost contact with the plane.
A spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut said today that neither the PLO nor any organization affiliated with it had anything to do with the TWA crash. Yesterday, a group calling itself the Arab Nationalist Youth for the Liberation of Palestine claimed it had planted a bomb aboard the American airliner. The PLO spokesman described that claim as “an attempt by the anti-Palestinian Zionist quarters to discredit the struggle of this heroic people at this particular time during which the Palestine case was gaining an excellent publicity on the international level.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
