Last update - 00:00 24/05/2007
Shir-el went to get her mom a sweater, and she never came back
By Mijal Grinberg
Shir-el Friedman, 35, was sitting with her mother on a bench near their Sderot home before she was killed by a Qassam rocket Monday night. Noticing that her mother was cold, she walked home to fetch her a pullover.
There was no siren as Shir-el neared the small apartment where she had resided with her mother. The early detection system had failed. The rocket slammed into a parked car just as Shir-el was walking past it. Her upper body was hit by shrapnel and she fell, losing consciousness in a pool of her own blood.
Her mother, 54-year-old Adella, was only a short walk away, but she had no way of knowing what had happened.
By the time the ambulance had reached the scene, Shir-el had passed out. The paramedics desperately tried to resuscitate her in the ambulance until they had reached Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, where she was declared dead.
After waiting for her daughter to return, Adella finally headed back home to wait for her in vain. One of Shir-el's brothers was called to identify the body in hospital.
The next morning, Adella was busy arranging her daughter's funeral from their two-room apartment. Adella is participating in the government's welfare-for-work Wisconsin plan. Her friends who also participate in the program all remember her slain daughter, who would often accompany her mother to work.
"She was always walking around from one place to the other," the neighbors recall. They speak of a pleasant, active woman. Adella sits in her bedroom, two photographs of Shir-el on the table. She is not crying. She just sits there, engulfed by a wave of pain.
A tall man wearing a skullcap enters the apartment. "That's Yisrael, my ex," Adella explains. Yisrael immigrated to Israel from Romania. He originally named his daughter Sabina, but she changed her name.
At noon, the bereaved converge in the municipal cemetery. Among them are Border Police officers, protecting Interior Minister Roni Bar-On, who is also attending the funereal. Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal is also attending. Adella is sitting across from them, in the women's section.
The men reiterate the hope this will be the last time Sderot will have to burry one of its children. Some residents interrupt Bar-On's eulogy, blaming him for using her death for political gain. He returns the accusation. The funeral ends.