Pinecrest journalist Steve Sotloff lost his life to Muslim militants who kidnapped him and proudly posted his decapitation on the Internet. But he kept a secret from them to the very end: He was Jewish, and an Israeli citizen. 
 
 Sotloff, who had managed to conceal his Jewish identity for years as he reported from potentially hostile spots around the Middle East, kept up his remarkable deception even during the year he was held after being kidnapped by the murderous Islamic State militia. 
 
 He prayed in the direction of Jerusalem and faked stomach aches so he could fast on Jewish holy days. Sotloff’s friends, who began talking about his trickery for the first time after the Islamic State posted a video of his mutilated body Tuesday, say they are certain that if the jihadist group had ever caught on, it would have boasted to its followers that it was killing a Jew. 
 
 Tuesday’s revelations came as reaction to Sotloff’s death — Islamic State’s second public murder of an American hostage in two weeks — continued to reverberate around the world, nowhere louder than the White House. 
 
 “Those who make the mistake of harming Americans will learn that we will not forget, and that our reach is long and that justice will be served,” said President Barack Obama at a news conference during a state visit to Estonia. Vice President Joe Biden, during an appearance in Maine, warned that the U.S. government will pursue the killers to “the gates of hell.” 
 
 At the Sotloff family home, the reaction was more somber. The family announced a memorial service, open to the public, at 1 p.m. Friday at Temple Beth Am, 5950 SW 88th St. 
 
 Sotloff’s abduction has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning. His family and the media outlets he worked for, including Time and Foreign Affairs magazines, didn’t reveal his kidnapping for fear of complicating efforts to win his release. 
 
 They also tried to scrub the public record of anything that suggested Sotloff was Jewish or Israeli. The Israeli government suppressed all archives that showed his citizenship. Even a brief biography of his mother, Shirley, which mentioned her parents were Holocaust survivors, was erased from the website of the Temple Beth Am Day School, where she taught. 
 
 (Though, as one of Sotloff’s friends wistfully noted, “on the Internet, nothing is ever really deleted.” The New York Times stumbled onto a cached copy of the biography and published a story on its website identifying Sotloff as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors before quickly expunging the reference. “We did not want to publish anything that could jeopardize — or be perceived as jeopardizing — his safety,” Times foreign editor Joe Kahn told the Miami Herald on Wednesday.) 
 
 Even when the Islamic State announced Sotloff’s captivity to the world last month in an Internet video — along with a blunt threat to kill him if U.S. foreign policy didn’t change — relatively few details emerged. Many news organizations, including the Miami Herald, learned that Sotloff was Jewish but held the fact back from their stories. 
 
 On Wednesday, details began to emerge for the first time. Among the first was a tweet from an Israeli foreign ministry official that announced: “Cleared for publication: Steven Sotloff was Israel citizen RIP.” 
 
 Sotloff grew up in Miami and attended the same school where his mother taught pre-school, but for the past decade his heart was in Israel after he had what friends called “a Jewish roots experience.” 
 
 Like hundreds of thousands of young Jews, he took an all-expenses-paid educational trip to Israel sponsored by the Taglit-Birthright Israel foundation. Sometime afterward, he returned home to tell his parents he was dropping out of the University of Central Florida after three years pursuing a journalism degree and moving to a Tel Aviv suburb to major in government studies at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private college. 
 
 “They weren’t too thrilled about the idea of this,” said the Sotloff family’s rabbi, Terry Bookman. “But they didn’t get in his way.” 
 
 After graduating in 2008, Sotloff jumped into freelance journalism. He occasionally reported from Europe, including a story on Vienna’s ancient but beleaguered Jewish colony. But more often he was in the front lines of the Middle East, writing about the victims of the region’s endless wars. 
 
 Sotloff wanted “to give a voice to people that didn’t have a voice,” said his Interdisciplinary Center classmate Daniel Isaacsohn, 34, now a corporate personnel specialist in Boston . Agreed his elementary school playmate Danielle Berrin, now a Los Angeles writer: “As a journalist, he was drawn to places of tumult and conflict.” 
 
 But those places, including Libya and Syria, are not friendly to Jews or Israelis, so Sotloff became adept at fudging his background. “Apparently he had all these hilariously great cover stories for his name,” Berrin said. Other friends said Sotloff told people he was Chechen and that he was a secular Muslim. 
 
 The oddball cover stories reminded Berrin very much of the mischievous little boy she went to school with. “I remember him as this goofy, really playful, fun-loving kid,” she said. “He went off to boarding school [in New Hampshire], and we were out of touch for a long time. And then, out of the blue, I got this email from him. And I was really startled that he had grown into this serious, indefatigable and fearless journalist.” 
 
 Some of Sotloff’s friends, however, thought a little bit of fear might be good for him. On Sotloff’s visits home to Pinecrest, Rabbi Bookman cautioned him that Syria, torn by a tri-cornered civil war in which journalists are mostly considered targets rather than neutral observers, was too dangerous. 
 
 “There was no real stopping him,” Bookman said. “There was no talking him out of it. He knew how to be careful. He had been there before.” 
 
 And, Bookman added, he understood Sotloff’s passion. “He had a big humanist streak,” the rabbi recalled. “He was always curious about the Arab world; he became an Islamophile. He believed in the Arab spring. [And] his writing was exquisite.” 
 
 Bookman’s warning about Syria, however, was deadly right. Sotloff was abducted shortly after he and his driver crossed the border from Turkey. And, except for a single phone call to his parents last December, he was never heard from again. 
 
 But another foreign hostage who for a time was imprisoned with Sotloff but later released told his family that their son successfully deceived his captors about his Jewishness and even privately taunted them by watching them saying Muslim prayers in the direction of Mecca, then adjusting the angle so he could pray toward Jerusalem. 
 
 Mrs. Sotloff, certain it no longer mattered, videotaped a plea to the Islamic Nation last week in which she might have given away her son’s Jewish identity. “I ask you to use your authority to spare his life,” she said in the video, “and to follow the example set by the Prophet Mohammed, who protected people of the book.” 
 
 “People of the book” is a reference to a phrase in the Quran and sometimes an Islamic codeword for Jews. But it can also refer to Christians and some believers in some other pre-Islamic religions. 
 
 In any event, Sotloff’s religion probably had nothing to do with his fate. “They’re killing Christians,” Bookman said. “They’re killing Zoroastrians. They’re killing Shia. Putting a Jew into the hopper, I don't know if it matters.” 
 
 An earlier version of this story q uoted Steven Sotloff’s childhood friend, Danielle Berrin, as saying that he concealed his Jewish identity while traveling in hostile territory in the Middle East by claiming to be Chechen and a secular Muslim with little formal religious training. Berrin, however, says she was only repeating what she had read in other accounts. The Herald has nonetheless verified the account of Sotloff's cover stories with other friends. 
 
 Steven Sotloff service 
 
 There will be a memorial service for Steven Sotloff on Friday at 1 p.m. at Temple Beth Am, 5950 SW 88th St. The service will be open to the public. ||||| Steven Sotloff, the American journalist whose gruesome beheading was confirmed in a video released Tuesday night by Islamic State terrorists in Syria, first came to know Israel as an optimistic government student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. On Wednesday afternoon, the Foreign Ministry cleared for publication the fact that he held Israeli citizenship. 
 
 Sotloff, a Jewish native of Miami and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, came to Israel in 2008 to pursue his undergraduate degree at the IDC. He wasn’t starry-eyed about the Jewish state, a former classmate said last week. In fact, while he clearly loved Israel, his views on the country were as complicated as the region itself. 
 
 “Like most of us, he came here and he became very critical of the government,” said Hillary Lynne Glaser, who studied conflict resolution, international relations and counter-terrorism alongside Sotloff. 
 
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 “I’m not so sure it was about the Israeli-Arab conflict, I think it was more how they treat their own people. But he still came back to visit,” she said, noting that Sotloff was in Israel as recently as last year to celebrate the wedding of a former IDC roommate. 
 
 “He didn’t hate it enough to not come visit,” she said. “He still considered it his home.” 
 
 Bearded and big-boned, Sotloff was an imposing presence on campus. His personality, Glaser said, was as big as his form. 
 
 “He had such energy. Depending on how well you knew him, he was either abrasive or he was like a teddy bear,” she said. “I saw that nice soft side where all he wanted was to explore and find a girlfriend, find someone other than his roommates whom he could complain to about the state of Israel and embrace his travels with.” 
 
 After graduation, Sotloff began his freelance journalism career, filing stories for both the Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Report before moving on to outlets including Foreign Policy and TIME. Journalist Ilene Prusher, who served as his editor at the Jerusalem Report in 2011 and 2012, recalled a fearless writer who sent in polished stories and was hungry for more. 
 
 “He was an excellent journalist, and he filed great work,” she said. “He was our only guy who was filing [from the region], and he was filing for a bunch of different places… In addition to covering Libya, he was covering Arab uprisings. I felt like he really cared about it, he thought it was extremely important. He was very conscientious, enterprising and brave.” 
 
 On Wednesday, IDC President Prof. Uriel Reichman, said, “Steven’s murder proves to us that the immunity of journalists, once granted even in times of warfare in order to protect the truth and defend free speech, has been erased.” 
 
 As the Arab world was roiling, Sotloff began chasing its endless stories. As a freelancer, he traveled to Yemen, Libya and Egypt to chronicle the peoples’ uprising and dictatorial downfalls cascading across the Middle East, and then the surge of vicious new radicalism that came in their wakes. Eventually, his work took him to Syria, where he went missing on August 4, 2013. 
 
 His family knew that he had been kidnapped, but chose to keep the story quiet and rally for his release behind the scenes. Only on August 19, when a horrific video showing the barbaric beheading journalist James Foley at the hands of IS surfaced on YouTube, did the world learn that IS was also holding Sotloff. 
 
 The Times of Israel held this story for several weeks out of fear of endangering Sotloff’s life by writing about his Jewish and Israeli connections. 
 
 Sotloff was apparently captured by IS in Aleppo and held in Raqqa for nearly a year. In the video of Foley’s death, which showed Sotloff with a shaved head and wearing the same kind of orange jumpsuit as Foley, the IS terrorists gave US President Barack Obama 24 hours to respond to the situation, threatening that they would take Sotloff’s life next. 
 
 Obama condemned the murder and kidnapping in harsh terms, saying in a speech at Martha’s Vineyard that “the entire world is appalled” by Foley’s brutal murder and the entire Islamic State terror group. One week after the release of the Foley video, with Sotloff’s fate still uncertain, Shirley Sotloff, Steven’s mother, released an emotional video plea for her son’s release. 
 
 In the video, Shirley Sotloff — whose parents survived the Holocaust — directly addressed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS, and acknowledged his authority as caliph over the Islamic State. In a note inserted by The New York Times at the video’s beginning, editors said that she was perhaps the first-ever non-Muslim to acknowledge al-Baghdadi’s authority. 
 
 While Sotloff’s fate hung in the balance over the past two weeks, friends and colleagues reacted with shock. 
 
 “This man, and what he achieved, it was fascinating,” said Michael Sapir, who played rugby with Sotloff in Israel. “He was a remarkable man with a great amount of courage.” 
 
 In July of 2013, Sotloff returned to Israel for a visit and he and Sapir went to the Wingate Institute in Netanya to cheer on the Israeli rugby team. It would be the last time Sapir saw his friend, and when he found out a year later that Sotloff had been kidnapped shortly after the visit, he described his reaction as “surreal.” 
 
 Oren Kessler, an American-Israeli journalist currently working in London, spent a big chunk of his workday on August 20, the day after the video of Foley’s death was released, combing through years’ worth of online correspondence between himself and Sotloff. The two had never met in person, but began chatting online via Facebook in 2011 when Sotloff sent Kessler, the former Middle East affairs correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, a message introducing himself. 
 
 “He wrote me and said, ‘Hey Oren, I’m also an IDC grad and I think you were in Egypt around the same time as me. Good to know there’s a good regional reporter for the JPost,’” Kessler said then, while looking through his archived messages. 
 
 At the time, Kessler was reporting on Libya, where Sotloff was stationed. As two Jewish journalists writing about the ever-hostile Middle East, they struck up a sort of alliance. 
 
 “There weren’t many people in Libya who were willing to talk to a reporter from the Jerusalem Post. He was one of the only people on the ground who would talk to me,” Kessler said. “And then he was in Egypt and then in Syria… We would exchange contacts, say, ‘Hey, do you know anybody here?’ as journalists do.” 
 
 Every time Sotloff came to Israel, the pair would pledge to get together for a beer. It never happened. 
 
 “He was my almost-friend,” Kessler said. “Sort of like a pen pal.” 
 
 Also on August 20, after the graphic video of Foley’s beheading surfaced and the public realized that Sotloff’s fate hung in the balance, Kessler and Glaser, Sotloff’s former classmate, both circulated a petition on their Facebook pages calling on the White House to do everything in its power to help free Sotloff. 
 
 In his posting, Kessler reminisced a bit about past conversations with Sotloff, in which the latter brushed off threats of Islamic fundamentalism and cheekily said that if he should be captured, “I’ll just let them convert me.” 
 
 Sotloff, Kessler said, never shared his Jewish identity with anyone in the field, opting instead to tell locals that he had been raised Muslim but secular, without mosque affiliation. He sometimes even chose to tell people that he was of Chechen origin, and that Sotloff – a name that rings decidedly Jewish to those familiar with Jewish names – was actually a Chechen name. 
 
 In Yemen, Kessler said, Sotloff once allowed locals to give him a “quickie conversion,” a 10-minute ceremony meant to return him to his purported Islamic roots. 
 
 “You could say a petition won’t change anything, and you’d be right, but f*ck if I know what else to do,” Kessler said. ||||| Steven Sotloff, the journalist beheaded by the Islamic State, was a dual Israel-US citizen and had even studied in Israel, it emerged Wednesday, the day after a video of his brutal murder was aired online. 
 
 The White House says it has determined that the video showing his killing is authentic, after Islamic State extremists released the video showing Sotloff's beheading on Tuesday. It comes two weeks after the militants released a video showing the killing of James Foley, another American journalist. 
 
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 Sotloff made aliyah and studied at the IDC some 10 years ago. After his capture in Syria, it seems any connection to Israel was deleted from his online presence in a bid to prevent the information from reaching his captors. 
 
 National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden announced the US intelligence community's assessment of the video in a statement Wednesday. 
 
 Colleagues and acquaintances remembered Sotloff as a generous man fascinated by journalism and the changes gripping the Middle East, and determined to tell stories from the perspective of average people, not army movements on the battlefield. 
 
 Sotloff in Syria (Photo: Gettyimages) 
 
 A friend who was with Sotloff in captivity told Ynet's sister-print publication Yedioth Aharonoth that Sotloff was Jewish - a fact he hid from his captors - and even managed to observe the Yom Kippur fast while in Islamic State captivity. 
 
 "He told them he was sick and didn’t want to eat, even though we were served eggs that day," the friend said. "He used to pray secretly in the direction of Jerusalem. He would see in which direction (his Muslim captors) were praying and then adjust the angle." 
 
 Steven Sotloff (Photo: EPA) 
 
 Others recalled his professionalism: "He struck me as a very, very decent guy ... he wasn't chasing headlines, he wasn't hyping a pitch," said James Denton, publisher and editor of the Washington-based journal World Affairs, one of several publications that hired him for freelance work. Others included TIME and Foreign Policy. 
 
 "He wanted to get the story, he wanted to peel away the layers," said Denton, who met Sotloff over coffee in Washington in May 2013, and published two of his dispatches from Cairo the following July. 
 
 'An honorable man' 
 
 Sotloff, a 31-year-old Miami-area native who freelanced for Time and Foreign Policy magazines, vanished in Syria in August 2013 and was not seen again until he appeared in a video released last month that showed Foley's beheading. 
 
 Dressed in an orange jumpsuit against an arid Syrian landscape, Sotloff was threatened in that video with death unless the US stopped airstrikes on the Islamic State. 
 
 At Sotloff's parents' home in Pinecrest, Florida., two police vehicles blocked the driveway Tuesday, and officers advised journalists to stay away. Friends of the family could be seen coming and going. 
 
 A spokesman for the family, Barak Barfi, said in a brief statement that the family “knows of this horrific tragedy and is grieving privately,” 
 
 "Everyone's been concerned. Everyone is grieving," neighbor Pepe Cazas said. "It's terrible. I've been praying for him." 
 
 Last week, Sotloff's mother, Shirley Sotloff, pleaded with his captors for mercy, saying in a video that her son was "an innocent journalist" and "an honorable man" who "has always tried to help the weak." 
 
 Sotloff grew up in the Miami area, and graduated from Kimball Union Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire. He was also a student at Temple Beth Am Day School in Florida. 
 
 As a student at Kimball, Sotloff "developed a passion for reporting and writing, a gift that he shared with people around the world, and this unthinkable act of terror has taken him from us far too soon," New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan said in a statement. 
 
 Sotloff then attended the University of Central Florida, which said he majored in journalism from 2002 to 2004, but apparently left without graduating. 
 
 Just how Sotloff made his way from Florida to Middle East hotspots is not clear. He published articles from Syria, Egypt and Libya in a variety of publications. Several focus on the plight of ordinary people in war-torn places. 
 
 One individual familiar with the case said the family's theory had been that Sotloff was grabbed by a criminal gang, and later transferred or "sold" to Islamic State. This could not be confirmed by his family, which declined interview requests. 
 
 Preparing for the trip to Syria, Sotloff reportedly asked a fellow reporter in June 2013: "What type of lawlessness in Aleppo? Should I keep my eyes open for anything regarding safety?" 
 
 "Can you meet with ISI," he asked, using an earlier acronym for Islamic State. "And the quality of life? Is there still plenty of food available? Gas?" 
 
 In a statement, Foreign Policy magazine called him a "brave and talented journalist" whose reporting "showed a deep concern for the civilians caught in the middle of a brutal war." 
 
 Time editor Nancy Gibbs said Sotloff "gave his life so readers would have access to information from some of the most dangerous places in the world."
– Like James Foley, who sent a last letter to family, slain journalist Steven Sotloff kept a secret from his Islamic State captors until the very end: He was Jewish, held both US and Israeli citizenship, and purposefully hid the fact from his captors, friends say. "He told them he was sick and didn't want to eat, even though we were served eggs" on Yom Kippur, an unidentified captive once held with Sotloff tells Israel's Yedioth Aharonoth, per Ynet News. "He used to pray secretly in the direction of Jerusalem." Though it appears all mention of Sotloff's Jewish heritage was scrubbed from the Internet after the Miami native's capture in Syria, details came out after video of his execution was posted online. "Cleared for publication: Steven Sotloff was Israel citizen RIP," an Israeli official tweeted yesterday. Several publications, including the Times of Israel, note they withheld the fact for weeks so as not to endanger his life. After studying journalism at the University of Florida, Sotloff moved to Israel in 2008 to finish his degree at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, eventually gaining his citizenship. As he began reporting in war-torn areas unfriendly to Jews and Israelis, he learned to hide his Jewish identity, the Miami Herald reports. Did he fool ISIS in the end? "Of course, none of us have talked to [the Islamic State] about it," a friend of Sotloff's says. "But don't you think they would have been bragging about it if they knew they were killing a Jew?"