The tzibur is requested to continue being mispallel for 8-year-old Rachel Efrat bat Yehudit, who is the only survivor of her family following the tragic vehicular accident in Tiveria earlier in the week. R”L her parents and siblings, eight in total, were killed in the crash.

Rachel today, Thursday, was released from Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and will be living with her aunt in Tzfat.

“It was a difficult night. Rachel did not sleep much. She cried a great deal. The next day, the morning after the crash is also quite difficult. She was very quiet and broke out in tears from time-to-time” explained Adi Pecter-Ellet, director of social services at Rambam.

For now, it is a day at a time and the family is quite concerned for Rachel’s emotional well being. The same may be true in Moshav Bar-Yochai, where neighbors and close friends of the Atias family painfully attempt to make sense of the new reality, the vacant home, the missing smiles of the children, the vacant seat in daily minyanim.

Close friends explain that they are all there, along with the family, seeking to support Rachel, but the young child simply cannot understand the blow, the personal Holocaust they has stricken her life. Today, they are all gone, those who were her world are no longer and little Rachel Efrat must now learn to get on without them, somehow learn to accept this new unwanted reality.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)