When the sirens sounded around the city of Beit Shemesh on the second day of the war, Rabbi Yitzhak Biton suggested to his son they find a safe space at home rather than go to the nearest shelter.
But Yaakov felt worried and preferred to go.
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He and his two younger sisters, Avigail and Sarah, headed out for the shelter beneath the local synagogue. Their parents stayed in the house.
Three minutes later, the missile hit.
“There was a tremendous explosion and an enormous blast wave,” Biton remembers. “The ceiling fell in, the windows flew out, everything collapsed. It was a miracle we survived.”
The synagogue was destroyed and in flames.
Biton waited as rescue workers slowly began to bring out bodies. Eventually the police asked him to leave.
“We waited at home until they came to take a DNA sample. Then I understood where this was going.”
School and synagogue razed
Nine people were killed at the missile strike on Beit Shemesh, including Yitzhak Biton’s three teenage children.
A school and a synagogue were razed to the ground. It was the deadliest strike on Israel since the war began.
We meet Biton and his wife, Tamar, sitting shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning ceremony, in a Jerusalem hotel.
A steady stream of visitors come to sit with the family and offer their condolences. Their one remaining child, four-year-old Rachel, chases around the lobby on a scooter.
“The girl understands and knows, she sees the change,” Biton says, “but she is coping with it bravely. She knows they have gone to a higher place.”
Faith has helped the couple cope. Tamar does not wish to be interviewed but smiles beatifically for a photograph.
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Rabbi prefers to talk about children
Her husband is happy to talk to us about his children but as a religious man, he will not be drawn on politics or the decision his government made to attack Iran which has come at such terrible cost to his family.
“I do not interfere in such matters,” he says.
“They were very very special. But I understand that everything is according to the will of the Creator. It is known that in war, in the end, everyone comes out losing. There is no war in which a person comes out a real winner.
“Sometimes the victor is the defeated one.”
