A newly married young couple was laid to rest in the Susya cemetery Monday afternoon after losing their lives in a tragic car crash near Kiryat Arba earlier in the day. The accident came just ten days after parents of eight were killed in a similar accident nearby.

More than a thousand people attended the double funeral of Tzviki (22) and Hadassah (nee Cohen) Stitskin, residents of the Maon community. The couple was married just two months ago.

Tzviki's father, Rabbi Donnie Stitskin, is the rabbi of the community of Maon, from where the joint funeral set out after heartbreaking eulogies that evoked the cries of hundreds of mourners. Rabbi Stitskin is a veteran of a similar bitter experience with his good friend, the late Rabbi Yosef Dickstein; the latter was murdered, together with his wife and son, by terrorists on a Friday afternoon in 2002, and Rabbi Stitskin spent the Sabbath together with the nine remaining orphans.



The mourning also envelopes the Gush Katif refugee communities throughout the south, as Hadassah lived in N'vei Dekalim, from where her family was thrown out during the expulsion of 2005. Her father, Rabbi Meir Cohen, was the unofficial rabbi of the secular community of Pe'at Sadeh, near N'vei Dekalim; the family is now living with other former N'vei Dekalim residents in Ein Tzurim.



Details of the accident were unclear at first, but it now appears that the couple's car swerved inexplicably into an oncoming truck at around 7 AM, south of Kiryat Arba. Medics who arrived on the scene first found Tzviki's body and then realized that two people had been killed when they found that of his young wife.



Just ten days ago during a brief but heavy snowstorm the rabbi of the town of Telem and his wife - parents of eight - were killed when the car swerved into an oncoming bus. The communities of Maon and Telem are located several kilometers southeast and northwest of Kiryat Arba-Hevron, respectively.