An early morning 6.1-magnitude aftershock rumbled through the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince Wednesday, sending people fleeing into the streets as rescue crews continued their last-ditch efforts to find signs of life beneath the ruined city’s towers of rubble.
If perhaps momentarily deterred by the shaking, relief missions continued apace through the morning with aid workers distributing food and water to increasingly desperate residents, Israeli military doctors treating the sick and injured at a field hospital, and a rabbi from the neighboring capital of S. Domingo dispatching supplies and non-perishable foods by the truck full.
Reached one hour after the aftershock, Rabbi Shimon Pelman, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of the Dominican Republic, said that news of the latest shaking caught him by surprise. Having been awake on an almost 24-hour cycle receiving updates from the Israel Defense Force’s field hospital and supervising shipments of aid, Pelman actually fell asleep in the middle of the night and slept through the temblor.
The rabbi, who was in Haiti on Friday and Monday, said that more trucks would head towards the devastated Caribbean nation throughout the week. He added that on Tuesday, some 2,000 ready-to-eat meals arrived in the disaster area from New York.
“Thousands of people are in desperate need of the most basic of essentials,” said Pelman, who urged people to donate to every reliable agency that has come to Haiti’s aid, including a relief fund he established in conjunction with the Puerto Rico-based Chabad of the Caribbean. “Things like water, medications. The field hospital needs supplies. Even with all of the international help currently in Haiti, it’s not enough.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that on Tuesday, another unit from the IDF’s Home Front Command arrived in Haiti. To date, some 367 patients had been treated at the Israeli hospital, a network of tents set up in a soccer field. A total of seven babies have been born at the hospital since it opened on Saturday.
Pelman, who last week thought that all members of Haiti’s Jewish community had been accounted for, received an urgent phone call from a resident of Montreal, Canada, reporting that his cousin, a visiting businessman, was likely in Port-au-Prince when the Jan. 12 earthquake struck. The rabbi informed ZAKA, an Israeli emergency response organization that sent a team to Haiti, which dispatched rescuers alongside IDF soldiers to the Hotel Montana.
International news outlets reported that the fate of the 37-year-old man, Alexander Bitton, could not be ascertained, but that the site where he was believed to be trapped likely harbored many victims.
The popular hotel sits completely flattened, Chilean national police detective Adolfo Valdiva told the Canwest News Service.
“We’ve searched with dogs and listened if there were voices,” he said. “No positive results.”
Alexander Bitton, an information technology consultant and member of Montreal’s Jewish community, “was either in the lobby or in his room, I don’t know,” the man’s wife, Line Dufresne, was quoted as saying by The Toronto Star. “There are rescuers at the hotel. … I have hope.”
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