Friends of family killed in Dead Sea crash 'left with hole in our hearts'

In the past month, two families died in car accidents on Road 90.

Yariv and Shoshi Atar (photo credit: Courtesy)
Yariv and Shoshi Atar
(photo credit: Courtesy)
An entire family from Psagot was wiped out Tuesday following a head-on collision on Route 90 near Ein Bokek, when they were trapped inside their burning car.
"I can't believe I have to talk about them in the past tense," said Miriam Dadon, a close friend of the late Shoshi Atar, wife of Yaniv and mother of six, said on Army Radio Wednesday morning.
"Instead of getting a hug from her at my son's [upcoming] bar mitzvah," said Dadon, "we will need to give a different kind of hug. She was an island of sanity that only thought of goodness."
"In this kind of situation, there is nothing to say. We just have to hug one another and cry," concluded Dadon.
"Everybody who was close to them was left with a hole in his heart," said Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Waitzman, the rabbi of Psagot. "The space we will have to fill up together and strengthen our community together."
All eight members of the Atar family were killed in the Dead Sea accident. This included parents, Yariv, 45 and Shoshi, 47, as well as their six children: Yaakov Israel, 12, Ateret, 11, Ayala, nine, Moria, seven, Yedid, five, and Avigail, three.
In the past month, two families died in car accidents on Road 90. A baby and her parents were killed in an accident between a bus and their car near Neot Hakikar earlier in October.
Haim Riva, superintendent of the Negev Traffic Department Office, told Army Radio that infrastructure problems were not the cause of the Atar family's accident.
Avraham Gold contributed to this report.