Last update - 00:00 08/08/2007
Four yeshiva students die in Judean Desert car crash
By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent
Four yeshiva students were found dead in the Judean Desert Tuesday after their vehicle fell off a cliff. Another was found wounded, nearly 10 hours after the accident, and was evacuated by helicopter to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva.
The five yeshiva students had decided on a trip to the Judean desert on Monday, traveling in a 4X4 vehicle. At approximately 4 PM they entered a path meant for hikers, not vehicles. At some point the vehicle slipped backward, over the edge into the wadi.
"We fell like you see in the movies," said Hagai Shlomo, 22, the driver of the vehicle, to his rescuers. "Everything was crushed. I prayed the whole time."
The four dead are all students in the Telzston yeshiva in Kiryat Ye'arim. Two are brothers, Sinai Shirazi, 23, and Amir Shirazi, 20, from Netanya; Gilad Dahari, 26, from Moshav Elyachin; and Avi Rosenfeld, 22, of Kiryat Ye'arim.
At approximately 11 PM, a call was received by emergency services that the group was missing, according to Haim Weingarten, a volunteer in Zaka, an ultra-Orthodox organization dedicated to collecting body parts after disasters.
Weingarten contacted a friend of the five, who said that they had been expected at a wedding.
After talking with Rosenfeld's wife, who is eight-months pregnant, he learned that she had spoken with her husband at 3 PM.
"He had told her that they were about to enter a river-bed in the Judean Desert for about an hour, and then they would drive to pick her up on the way to the wedding."
When the five yeshiva students did not show up at the wedding, it soon became evident to the revelers that something serious had happened.
The main problem for rescuers was that no one knew exactly where the students had gone. All they had to go by was the "Judean Desert."
Police began making inquiries, and using technology identified the location from which the final telephone call was made. That allowed the rescuers to narrow the area of the search.
At 4:30 AM, Elad Skar, head of the Arava rescue unit, received the alert. Using 4X4 vehicles, the rescuers searched the area until someone heard the cries of the injured man. The found the vehicle about 35 meters below the path, with the bodies of the dead students nearby.