Deadly crash places grandparents in roles they weren’t supposed to replay
Four family members step up, still not knowing what lies ahead, after crash kills mother and infant baby and critically injures father and son
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
HALAMISH, West Bank — It’s 7 p.m. on Monday in the Rimel household, which means it’s time to get the children ready for bed.
Three-year-old Harel is in the middle of another lap around the living room with his toy vacuum cleaner when his grandmother stops him to declare that it’s bath time.
“Are you going to be mommy?” he asks, referring to bathing duties, as he looks up at his mother’s mother with an innocent smile.
Ita Gantz smiles back at her young grandchild, but remains silent.
“When I don’t have an answer, I prefer not to say anything,” she later explained.
Harel and his siblings Amichai, 7, and Leah, 9, know about the December 1 car crash that killed their mother Tzippi and 3-week-old baby sister Noam, and critically injured their father Ephraim and 12-year-old brother Itay, but they’re still full of questions to which no one has the answers.
Well into their 60s, the Gantzes have found themselves taking on the role of full-time caregivers to the kids as their son-in-law and grandson remain in the ICU of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
On Friday, doctors slowly began extubating Ephraim, several days after he underwent surgery to stabilize his spine. The 35-year-old is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the crash, and his parents said it would take a miracle for him to be able to walk again. In the pediatric ICU lies Itay, who has remained in life-threatening condition and hooked up to a respirator since arriving with significant injuries to his head and internal organs.
Harel, Amichai and Leah were not in the car with their parents and two other siblings when it was smashed from behind by a reckless driver earlier this month.
A police spokesman told The Times of Israel that 18-year-old Tareq Kurd, who hit the Rimels outside the Givat Ze’ev settlement on Route 443, had been driving at 105 miles per hour (170 kph) at the time of the collision. He too was hospitalized in serious condition, but was discharged last week.
On Sunday, he was released on bail after the third of three brief detentions since the accident, but prosecutors plan to indict him in the coming days for reckless manslaughter — a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison per count.
Tzippi and Noam were added to the shockingly long list of traffic fatalities from 2019, which has continued to grow, even since their crash, to 329. Last year 316 people were killed in traffic accidents.
Providing normalcy when there’s no such thing as normal
During the first seven days after the crash, Ephraim’s parents Shulamit and Yogi Rimel moved into Tzippi and Ephraim’s home in the settlement of Neve Tzuf, also known as Halamish, to take care of the three kids, as Ita and Yisrael observed the shiva mourning period for their daughter and granddaughter. At its conclusion, the Gantzes tapped out their Rimel counterparts so that the latter could be by Ephraim and Itay’s bedsides.
“There was never a discussion over where we would be,” said Yisrael quietly as he sat off to the side in the living room as the children were eating dinner. “We want them to continue to have their routines, which include living here.”
The grandparents have not been facing the challenge alone. As the children were finishing up their food, a knock was heard on the door and in walked an unsolicited neighbor with a fresh pie of pizza.
The Rimel children have been going to school every day since the accident and Ita stays behind to clean and do laundry.
“It’s important for the house to be the same as Tzippi would have kept it,” she said as she looked for a pair of pajama pants for Amichai.
The grandmother had meticulously organized the boys’ clothes in their closet, but it still took her several minutes to find the pajamas.
Asked for further details on their routines as substitute-parents, Yisrael admitted that the reality has at times been far from organized, no matter how hard they try.
“Today they woke up at around 7 a.m., but there have been nights where the youngest wakes up at 4 a.m. screaming for his dad,” he recalled.
Yisrael has been sleeping on the living room couch next to the boys’ room while Ita has been in the guestroom next to Leah’s, so that the children can find them easily before going into their parents’ now-empty bedroom.
The Gantzes have not been back to their home in Tzafria near Ben Gurion Airport since the car crash.
“The joy of being a grandparents is that you don’t have to deal with the bad. If the kids didn’t clean up, that would be on their parents to take care of it,” Ita said. “Now, we are expected to fill in, and that sometimes means arguing with them if they don’t listen.”
Harel suddenly reappeared from his room to show this reporter a picture of his mother.
“You see? How are we supposed to respond to this?” Yisrael lamented as he tried to drag the restless child back to bed.
The three-year-old said something excitedly, but due to his speech impediment his grandparents could not make out what he was saying.
“This is another thing we’ll have to get used to. His parents were able to understand him. His siblings too,” the boy’s grandfather said.
‘We don’t even know what we’ll need’
Similar to the Gantzes, Shulamit Rimel admitted that she and her husband had been running on empty since the crash, spending just about every waking hour at the hospital.
“We’re past empty at this point. We’re on fumes,” Yogi Rimel chimed in as the two sat in the ICU waiting room on Friday.
They leave their home in Neve Tzuf at 7:30 a.m. each day and stay at the hospital till after 10 p.m.
Yogi quipped that the only exercise he and his wife have been getting has been walking every hour or so from the general patient ICU where Ephraim had been to the pediatric ICU in an adjacent building where Itay is being treated.
But even when Shulamit and Yogi are together with either Ephraim or Itay, there has always been another relative, friend or neighbor from Neve Tzuf at the bedside of the other.
“It’s been a 24/7 hotline here. Doctors eventually told us to limit the number of people coming to Itay’s bedside because they were worried he would catch a winter virus,” Shulamit said.
“People have reached out from all over the world,” she noted gratefully.
Tzippi was a teacher in Neve Tzuf and Ephraim is a coordinator for the Ezra religious youth movement. The couple spent four years as emissaries in Chicago, and Shulamit said several friends there had flown over to visit immediately upon hearing the news.
Given the circumstances, the atmosphere in the hospital waiting room was relatively upbeat, as visitors sought to keep the Rimels’ spirits up through constant chatter.
Asked how she’s been able to continue functioning, Shulamit said, “We can sit here and cry all day, but I’m tired of doing that. We’ve cried plenty, and now we’re trying to be strong for Ephraim.”
At that point, their 35-year-old son was still regaining consciousness and not speaking.
But in the hours following the crash, Ephraim had been awake and alert.
Yogi said that his son managed to remember his father’s phone number and had a medic call from the ambulance.
“There’s been an accident. I don’t remember what happened. Come to the hospital,” is all Ephraim managed to tell his father.
When Shulamit and Yogi arrived at Shaare Zedek, the first thing Ephraim asked them was whether the crash had been his fault and whether he still had his legs because he could not feel them.
“Almost immediately after being told what happened, he asked whether they could donate any of Tzippi’s organs,” Shulamit recalled matter-of-factly. Doctors managed to procure Tzippi’s corneas.
An exhausted-looking Yogi had been resting his eyes as his wife spoke, but he cut her off briefly to share what he felt was one of the more difficult aspects of the past couple of weeks.
“I’ve had to become the healthcare proxy for both of them — something that a grandparent should never have to be. Certainly not for a grandson, and not for a son who’s an adult. It’s just not something in the saba and savta handbook,” he lamented, using the Hebrew words for grandparents.
But Shulamit pushed back on the notion that the crash had forced them to become parents to their grandchildren.
“We want to be able to help Ephraim become a full-time father again,” she said, adding that the family was still praying that he might be able to walk one day.
Still, Ephraim’s parents acknowledged that their son’s recovery would be lengthy.
“We don’t really know what lies before us,” said Yogi.
Among the burdens the family will have to assume, he said, were financial ones, including making their house handicap-accessible, covering lost wages and providing psychological resources for the children.
To help, residents of Neve Tzuf opened up a crowdfunding page for the Rimels in the days after the accident. Money has since poured in from around the world, and as of Tuesday evening nearly $1 million had been donated — 68% of the NIS 5 million ($1.43 million) goal.
“It shows the number of people that Tzippi and Ephraim touched in their relatively short lives. And Ephraim’s is going to get longer,” Shulamit declared.
“We know that God hears our prayers but hope that he answers them too,” she added.
