Alexandra Garmitzky

Dec 5, 2005 - Alexandra Garmitzky, 65, of Netanya was one of five people killed and in a suicide bombing at the entrance to the Sharon shopping mall in Netanya in which over 50 were wounded. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.

At 11:30 in the morning, a female police officer and passersby identified a man approaching the Sharon Mall in Netanya as a suicide bomber, and shouted out warnings. The security guards stopped the man, pushing him up against the wall, and nearby police officers rushed to help. At that point, the bomber detonated the explosives he had in his bag. One of the security guards was killed, and the the policemen were wounded.

Dr. Andrei Garmitzky is a urologist at the Hillel Yafeh Medical Center in Hadera, and the only child of Vichislav and Alexandra Garmitzky. As soon as he heard about the bombing at the Sharon Mall in Netanya, he telephoned his mother, knowing that she often went shopping there. When he failed to reach her, he hurried to the emergency room at his hospital to look for her among the wounded. He identified her body at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir.

Alexandra and her husband immigrated to Israel eight years ago from Ukraine, where she worked as a bookkeeper. On Monday morning she went out on an errands to the local National Insurance Institute branch, and later stopped in to do some shopping at the Sharon Mall.

Alexandra Garmitzky was buried in the cemetery at Kibbutz Bahan. She is survived by her husband Vichislav, and only son, Andrei, 41.