They were on the way to the public shelter in the town synagogue.
But an Iranian missile cut them down.
The three teenage Biton siblings—Yaakov, 16, Avigail, 15, and Sarah, 13—were among the nine residents killed in Sunday’s Iranian missile strike on Beit Shemesh, located about 18 miles west of Jerusalem, in the most lethal attack since the conflict began over the weekend.
The children, who were laid to rest at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem on Sunday night, are survived by their parents and youngest sister.
“God could have taken one, could have taken two, but apparently He chose to take them all,” their father, Rabbi Yitzhak Biton, told the Israeli Ynet website.
Biton, his wife and their youngest daughter, who had stayed in their home, survived the afternoon missile attack, which was not intercepted.
He recounted that he had a bad feeling about the attack—which also killed a mother and her daughter, a mother and her son, a 16-year-old teen, and a father of four—when the sirens went off. He felt that the communal shelter under the makeshift synagogue was too crowded, so his son led his two sisters to the public shelter, which suffered a direct hit.
In his eulogy for his three children during their funeral at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem on Sunday night, Biton urged unity among the people of Israel.
“We must change the way we speak and our discourse with one another,” he said. “We need to speak politely and stop with the senseless hatred. It permeates the youth. The mission is to increase gratuitous love.”
Their grandmother, Lilian, lamented: “I didn’t lead them to the wedding. I’m leading them to a cemetery.”
