Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist beheaded on video by ISIS militants, was Jewish and an Israeli citizen, information that Sotloff, Israel, and news outlets attempted to hide for fear that it would increase his chances of being executed.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Wednesday that Israel's Foreign Ministry cleared them to reveal that Sotloff had become a citizen of Israel when he studied in the country:

The Foreign Ministry cleared for publication Wednesday that Sotloff, 31, held Israeli citizenship. His connections to Israel and the Jewish community reportedly had been sanitized from the Internet and social media in order to keep the information from his radical Islamic captors.

Sotloff, a grandson of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Miami, made aliyah in 2005 and studied foreign relations at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, a private college, Ynet reported. He then began reporting from countries throughout the Middle East, returning to Israel for the 2013 Maccabiah Games.

Details of Sotloff's heritage and citizenship were "scrubbed" from media reports, which, as the NY Mag reports, included one particularly close call by The New York Times, which initially reported that Sotloff's grandparents were Holocaust survivors before quickly pulling the information from their website.

According to accounts by former captives, Sotloff continued to pray and secretly observe Jewish holy days while in captivity. One former captive said that Sotloff directed his prayers to Jerusalem using the militants' prayers as a reference and pretended to be ill in order to fast on Yom Kippur.