With Aharon Ilovitch we talked about his father, Eliezer Ilovitch, whose traces were lost about four years ago in the Zion Hashabi area in Miron and in the last two days a group of friends mobilized to distribute his picture on the Internet and the call to drive efforts to locate him.
“The last time there were searches was about three months ago,” says Aharon, “we went out with the canine unit, police officers and a few other friends.” Before that there were from time to time rounds of joint searches for a number of missing persons including Moishi Kleinerman and another missing person from Mitzvah from the last few days.
Aharon finds it difficult to know or understand why this area of Zion’s Tomb of the Rabbis is the focus of the disappearances of various missing persons. About the last time he spoke with his father, he says it was a phone call before he was supposed to come to sit in Miron. Aharon canceled the visit and announced that he would only arrive on Shabbat night , “He didn’t answer me and since then his traces disappeared.”
Aharon talks about the assistance he, his four brothers and his mother have been receiving from the canine unit, Yakl, ever since the father’s disappearance became known. This is apart from the searches themselves for which the unit’s volunteers and friends are mobilized who periodically go on search operations accompanied by a unique application that records every place that is checked and scanned in order to focus the searches On other sites, Aharon himself went on such searches in the field hundreds of times, according to his words.
According to him, many times over the years, citizens have contacted the family and reported what might help to locate Eliezer, but in vain. “It happened many times, especially at the beginning. Not long ago, about a month or two ago, they sent me a picture of someone who looks like him in Jerusalem, the canine unit sent someone to check and it turned out that it wasn’t him.”
He also says that it is not possible to note any change in the father’s behavior and conduct in the period preceding his disappearance. The family’s hope from the latest publication, which as mentioned focuses on social networks, is “that the re-publication will bring people to open their eyes and maybe things will reach the Shin Bet and bodies outside the police. If the State of Israel wants to invest and find a missing person, it can reach him, just like they found terrorists and criminals. They can find my father and so can Rafi, Moishi and the new missing person,” he is convinced and adds: “It probably doesn’t interest them enough, that they won’t invest a day, two days or a week to find a father of five children or a 13-year-old boy who is missing. I’m sure that the Shin Bet didn’t invest or search, they didn’t open cameras. If that had happened, they would have found him.”
About the searches in which he took part, Aaron told that these include deployment in the field and often the searchers meet people who live in tents and caves in the forests of this sector, question them and find out details. Often these are eccentric people too.
Is the great hope that a phone call will suddenly arrive from the missing father? “This hope is always there. We don’t give up and hope that no one will give up and the hope is that even now when I finish this conversation he will call.”
