MONTREAL —After seven agonizing weeks for the family, the remains of Alexandre Bitton, the only Jewish Canadian killed in the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, were finally recovered March 2 in the rubble of the Hotel Montana, his mother confirmed last Friday.
Alexandre Bitton
When found, he was the only Canadian still missing at the completely levelled Port-au-Prince hotel.
“They know it’s him because they found him in his room with all his papers on him,” Jocelyne Bitton told The CJN last Friday. “He had his passport on him, his wallet on him with all his credit cards, so from what the RCMP is telling us, they are sure it is him.”
Still, while some closure came in knowing Bitton had been found, the family – still upset over what they said was a lack of co-operation by Foreign Affairs officials in keeping them informed about Bitton’s whereabouts – remained frustrated by delays in getting a necessary dental-record match done to absolutely confirm his identity.
“The coroner’s team was there on Thursday,” Jocelyne Bitton said last week, “but they changed people and they won’t be back at work until Sunday. The test won’t take place until Monday [March 8], and we hope to have [the confirmation] by the middle of the week.
“I don’t understand why the team couldn’t wait one more day,” she continued. “The waiting was hard for seven weeks, but this week it is unbearable, knowing he is found but cannot be put to rest.”
She said the family’s sense of relief in finally knowing her son’s fate was tempered by the awareness that all hope is now gone.
“This is the news we were waiting for, but didn’t want to hear,” she said. “We were getting desperate that he wouldn’t be found at all. Even in our head if we knew he was probably dead, there was a glimmer of hope. Now there’s none.”
She said it’s not yet known whether any family member or other member of the community would travel to Haiti to facilitate the return of her son’s body to Montreal.
Ironically, Jocelyne’s husband, Ralph Bitton, once supervised a sports-study program at Antoine-de-St-Exupery High School in Montreal’s east end that had included the participation of Olympic figure skating bronze medallist Joannie Rochette, whose mother, Therese, died suddenly in Vancouver just before her daughter was to compete. Jocelyne said her husband and Rochette stayed in touch on Facebook, but she didn’t know whether Rochette was aware of what had happened to her former teacher’s son.
“Ralph didn’t want to add to her pain by informing her,” Jocelyne said.
According to Shaare Zedek Congregation’s Rabbi Alan Bright, a friend of the family who has been in regular contact, there is a general consensus among religious authorities that mourning can begin once a body is recovered and identified.
Bright married Bitton and his wife, Line Dufresne, at his shul in August 2009, and they have a two-year-old son, Joshua.
Bitton, 36, was an Internet technology consultant and was on his first trip to Haiti on business with a colleague, who was just outside the hotel when it collapsed. The colleague survived.
