Just after 7:00 p.m. on Sunday evening in Israel, a two-year-old Charedi girl was found walking alone on the boardwalk in Teveria by the owner of a tourist boat company. The man reported to the police that he found the toddler but was unable to locate her parents. Tevaria police initiated a search for the girl’s missing parents and asked for assistance in locating them.
Volunteers from United Hatzalah in the city began searching in earnest and a team from the organization’s Psychotrauma and Crisis Response Unit was sent to the police station to care for the girl until her parents were located.
Over the next three hours, teams searched for the parents. United Hatzalah volunteer EMT Yisrael Buskila began sending WhatsApp messages to groups throughout the city asking people to report if they knew the whereabouts of the parents.
Shortly after 10:00 p.m., one of these messages reached the girl’s mother who contacted Yisrael. Yisrael alerted the mother to the plight of the daughter and asked that she and her husband come to the police headquarters to pick up their daughter. A short time later the family was reunited at the police station.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
3 Responses
I would assume that in such a case an investigation be done as to why this child was alone outside. The fact that seemingly there was no missing child report is like an alarm bell ringing. Either the parents are not competent or there is some other problem. seriously.
That a two-year-old can get out of the house is no surprise. It happens all the time and there is little that can be done to prevent it. They can be very clever in opening any locks, etc. And if it had happened in the middle of the night when the parents were asleep I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow; this is something that police will tell you happens regularly. But I do have to wonder how a child goes missing at 7:00 PM, and for three hours the parents don’t check on her. Let’s assume she was supposed to be in bad and asleep, still, for 3 hours you don’t look in on her? It’s a little odd. But there may be an innocent explanation, e.g. another child checked on her and saw some blankets and assumed it was her, or something. Or maybe the parents work a strange schedule and are asleep at that hour.
They could have thought she was sound asleep in her bedroom. One doesn’t always check on a sleeping toddler.