Motti Ben-Shabbat, 38, was identified as the Nahariya man who drowned on Wednesday afternoon. He died while performing his last act of mesirus nefesh and chessed when he left the safety of his home to rescue the occupants of a car that had flipped over in a stream of water from the Ga’aton river which had overflowed its banks.
A Chareidi avreich jumped into the water together with Motti to save the family and was saved by a nes. The avreich, Raviv Cohen, told Kikar Shabbos:
“I and Motti, z’l, saw people screaming for help, to be rescued from their car in the flood. We quickly jumped into the water and rescued them through the windows of the car.”
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“Suddenly I saw that Motti wasn’t there. I began to scream to the scuba divers to search for him in the depths. Motti told me a moment before he was swept away that he felt that he has no more strength and he was about to faint. He was swept to the shore through a drain pipe. I don’t want to think what he went through in those moments.”
“I cried out to Hashem to help us and that Motti should return alive but Hashem wanted differently. If there was no fence I would also have been swept away together with him. I was mamash saved by a nes.”
“We were good friends. I can’t believe that I’m speaking about him in past tense. I can’t absorb it – a person leaves his house to help people and doesn’t return.”
R’ Meir Rafael Chai Biton, who was a witness to the tragedy told Kikar Hashabat: “Motti saw from his home that a car with people in it was trapped in a flood. He went outside and rescued the family from the car and suddenly was swept away in the water and disappeared.”
“Motti became frum a few years ago. We davened together and learned together all Shabbos. I can’t come to terms with this.”
Biton described what it was like in Nahariya on Wednesday. “The entire city transformed into one big sea. People were barricading themselves in their houses.”
Motti’s relative said: “He always was a person of chessed that wanted to help people. His last act totally characterizes who he was.”
MDA paramedic Eran Friedlander said: “We arrived at the coast with a mobile intensive care unit, close to the marina. About 100 meters north of the Ga’aton river estuary we saw a man. He was unconscious, wasn’t breathing and was without a pulse.”
“The sea was very turbulent and huge amounts of water were streaming around us. We evacuated him from the coast with a field stretcher to the mobile intensive care unit while performing CPR . There we continued advanced resuscitation techniques but unfortunately, we were forced to determine his death.”
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