Father Overcomes Girl’s Death

By COLlive reporter

How does a father overcome the tragic and traumatic death of his daughter?

For Rabbi Viktor Atia, Director of Chabad of Kiryat Arba in Chevron, it took a year for the searing pain to subside after his daughter perished when their home went up in flames.

“6 years ago, on 20 Menachem Av, I get a phone call and my wife’s name Devora is on the screen,” he recalls in a short documentary film by Shlomo Chaim Rivkin, titled “The Magic of Life.”

“I hear a shout, ‘Victor, come home quick. Mushka was burnt.’ Chaya Mushka, my daughter, 8 and a half years old, was burnt and the call ended.”

Atiya, who has been the Shliach in Kiryat Arba for the last 26 years and was witness to many a tragic moment, says he felt like “the sky is falling down on me.”

He started saying Tehillim and drove back home. “It felt like the longest trip of my life,” he says. “I envisioned a funeral notice with my daughter’s name. I tried to take it out from in front of my eyes, (but) I see a funeral, and people from Chevron bringing the girl to the cemetery…

“When I came home, I got out of the car and asked my friend: ‘Avraham, is it true that they were not able to save my daughter?’ He gave me a big hug and said: ‘Viktor, Baruch dayan haemes.'”

Rabbi Atiya says he was in mourning for a full year, constantly feeling as if something kept stabbing at his heart. To cope with the tragedy, he intensified his outreach work to keep his mind off his loss.

In the process, he says, his personality changed. “I used to be an introvert and hesitated to speak to people,” he admits. He learned the art of magic and uses its entertaining illusions to put smiles on people’s faces, before saying a dvar Torah or asking them to do a mitzvah.

“When I see children her age, I obviously have many thoughts. ‘Maybe my daughter should have been this age by now’. There’s all sorts of thoughts, but I try to take the most positive things and go forward with them.”

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