Last update - 01:41 10/09/2006
Champion of the needy Yisrael Tuito dies at 41
By Ruth Sinai
The day before his death, Yisrael Tuito managed to file a High Court of Justice petition to require the government to use money from the National Insurance Institute reserves to help poor Israelis and to force Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to appoint a minister of welfare.
On Friday morning, Tuito went out to shop for his three daughters. He visited his mother, to whom he complained of feeling poorly, returned to the bus in Givat Shmuel that had been his home for the past decade, and showered. His daughters, who heard him fall, found him on the floor, already dead, apparently from a heart attack.
Tuito was 41 when he died, but looked older. The lines in his face were testimony to the burden of caring for the weak and protesting against injustice. His entire adult life was a protest against the establishment and its indifference toward the weak.
Tuito's father, Yaakov, related yesterday that ever since he was a little boy, Yisrael had always "collected" needy and hurt people and animals.
"All he wanted to do was to help people," his daughter, Shani, 16, said. Shani and her sisters, Meital, 19, and Zohar, 14, were a familiar sight at the various protest tents that their father erected, in Kikar Hamedina in Tel Aviv and the government compound in Jerusalem. Shani promised yesterday that she would carry on her father's legacy. Tuito will be laid to rest this afternoon at the Segula cemetery in Petah Tikva. t