4-year-old victim of March 2013 attack buried in Yakir.
By TOVAH LAZAROFFMourners bid farewell to four-year-old Adele Biton(photo credit: ALONI MOR)
Adva Biton asked God to end her four-year-old daughter Adele’s suffering as she watched her take one painful breath after another in Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva.The girl’s sudden fatal bout of pneumonia followed almost two years of pain as Adele struggled to recover from critical wounds she sustained when a terrorist stoned her parents’ car.“God must have wanted you by his side,” a tearful Adva addressed her daughter’s shroud-covered body, as mourners filled the small community center in the West Bank settlement of Yakir on Wednesday.Hundreds stood outside under a cloudy gray sky to hear Adva describe the last two years of her and Adele’s life, since that moment in March 2013 when a terrorist’s rock hurled on Route 5 caused the fateful accident that forever changed the family’s life From the moment Adele was wounded, Adva said, it was clear that she and her husband, Rafi, were fighting together for their daughter’s survival and that nothing else mattered.“It was a battle whose beginning I knew, but not its end,” she said. “This lack of uncertainty was the hardest part.”“You went through a very difficult time, my small one.Your physical suffering was so terrible, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Adva said, as she described the surgeries her daughter underwent just to stay alive.The doctors did not believe Adele would live, much less recover from her wounds.“I did not give up on you, not for one moment. I would not listen to anyone who said you did not hear or understand,” said Adva.“I knew how present you were, how much you did understand.I picked up your head, I turned it from side to side,” she said.“You did not give up, my warrior,” she said. The villainous terrorists “did not rob you of your beauty.“My dear Adele, you are my whole world,” said Adva as she recalled her daughter’s last day in the hospital.“I want you to know that yesterday I saw in your eyes how much you were suffering, how much you fought to take each and every breath. In my heart I feared that something bad was about to happen.“When they took you up to the critical care unit, I sat with myself and called out to God, to decide whether you were going to live or die. But I did not want you to suffer anymore. Forgive me, my daughter, I only wanted what is best for you; you deserve the best.God decided and He brought you to Him.Her father, Rafi, said he did not know how to deal with the void that his daughter’s death had left in his life and his heart.“The pain is intolerable,” he said.Now, he said, all that is left is to wait for the moment when he could join his daughter. The cemetery, he said, would now become his second home.Then he picked up Adele’s shroud-wrapped body in his arms and walked out of the community center with Adva at his side. They placed her body in an ambulance and walked slowly behind it in the rain with hundreds of mourners to where a grave had been prepared on a sandy hilltop at Yakir.Once the grave was filled, Rafi recited the Kaddish and Adva asked her daughter for forgiveness.“Adele, even the sky is crying over you,” she said.Their small settlement of 1,700 people near the city of Ariel has no cemetery, but Adva and Rafi asked the civil administration to authorize her burial there. When their request was denied, the Samaria Regional Council asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to intervene. When nothing happened, Adva and Rafi decided to bury Adele near their home even without authorization.“We are burying you here in Yakir, in the place where you were born. We are burying you here close to us,” Adva said. “We are burying you here so we can shout out loud that Judea and Samaria and all the land in Israel belong to us and will stay with us.”Delivering his eulogy, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein promised the family Adele’s small burial plot would receive authorization.In the evening, Netanyahu called Adele’s grandmother, Rachel, and said, “We are all weeping with you. We all embrace you. May the love of the people give you the strength for new life.”
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