The five-and-a-half year old girl who lost her mother and two sisters in the terrifying accident at Rav Shefa shares the experience* Top professionals have united to assist* The family’s home is packed with people coming to the shivah at all hours of the day* A fund initiated to help the family is growing

The Glustein family members are getting up from shivah, and are soon starting their return to routine. But both the family and the professionals who are attending to it well understand that, by the nature of things, it takes time to recover from the painful blow that hit them out of the blue.

In just one moment, they lost their mother and their two sisters. A third of the family are no more, and lie buried beneath cold marble tombstones. The home that was full and even crowded- was suddenly emptied. Now there’s more than enough room. They don’t understand why they need a two-bedroom apartment for a family with six people after they saw that it was even big enough for nine people…

Click here to help the Glustein family orphans, who lost their mother and two sisters

But even in the midst of the agony, the family is trying to see the rays of light and hope. The chinuch that Rav Dov Glustein shlit”a and ybl”ch his wife Shoshana a”h gave to their children is standing them in good stead at this time of wrenching crisis.

Even the five-and-a-half year old daughter who was also lying underneath the bus together with her mother and two sisters, one older and one younger than she, told of the individual Divine providence- hashgacha pratis- which she personally experienced there, in the midst of the tremendous chaos, as death was striking full force- and she was not harmed.

“I lay there, underneath the bus, I was very confused and absolutely terrified, and then came a tzaddik of a man, who pulled me out and lifted me in his hands,” she related. “Suddenly I saw my big brother there, I said to the man, ‘There’s my brother!’ He gave me to my brother, who was very happy to see me.”

The older brother relates that when he was standing across from them and saw the bus run over his mother and three sisters, he rushed over and immediately realized that his mother and two of his sisters had been killed, but he didn’t see the third sister, and when he saw that at least she had been saved from the horrific accident, he was very happy, despite the terrible pain and mourning for those who had been lost.

The activists who are assisting the family at this time of crisis emphasize that the family members still need a great deal of assistance in order to recuperate. “There are children here of all ages; each one is experiencing this in a different way, and each one needs to unburden himself from what’s paining him, and primarily to adjust to life as an orphan, without a mother, and without two sisters who disappeared in an instant. For this we are enlisting the help of top professionals, and of course this can be expected to be quite costly.”

They also point out that the family needs technical help on a regular basis: cleaning, cooking, childcare and babysitting, help with homework and more…”The neighbors, primarily the women, of course took upon themselves part of the responsibilities,  but we all know that there’s only one mother, and in order to fill the role of a mother who’s absent, much more is needed than several neighbors’ willingness to volunteer. What is needed here is the group participation of the whole Jewish public in order to finance all the expenses which are necessary for this family to continue on and be able to function reasonably well, and this is without taking into account that the mother Mrs. Shoshie a”h was the sole breadwinner of the family.”

Click here to help the Glustein family orphans who lost their mother and two sisters