"It will take a year, two years, but I will return. I will never leave you again."

October 1986. Ron Arad, a navigator in the Israeli Air Force crashes in Lebanon after his plane ware hit. Arad was taken in captivity and for over 25 years no significant news about his whereabouts has been delivered. Officially, He has been classified as Missing In Action.

Ron Arad became a symbol and an icon in Israeli society and his story become a national obsession. But Ron Arad was also a person; a son, a brother, a husband and a father to a 1 year old baby. He was a symbol to a nation but also a private person to his loved ones, who were asked by the government to wait and keep quiet.

3 years ago in a secret deal with the Hizballah organization, Israel received an Intelligence report about Ron Arad's unknown status. To this report Hizballah added a copy of pages that they saw no significance in, but to Tammy, his wife, who waited 22 years to hear his voice - it was everything. That night Tammy recognized her husband's handwriting, but decided to keep this lost diary a secret within the family, after being  in the public eye for all those years, she wanted to commune with his words alone.

After years of hesitations his family decided to show the letters Arad wrote to his family in captivity to the director Ben Shani and 'UVDA' and gave him the mandate to tell Ron's story. The challenge was to translate letters to image, to give voice to a person that was forgotten, to remember.

In the diary we found intimate moments, simple words, every day longing, attempt to remember and dream, to explain "hot" and "cold" to his new born baby and the hope that someday he will be reunited with his family. Ron Arad's destiny is unknown even today, he is assumed to be dead.

 For more stories from UVDA <<