Body believed to be Jewish Canadian finally recovered in collapsed Haiti hotel

Alexandre Shmuel Bitton After a month of continuous recovery work to locate the body of a missing Canadian Jewish businessman believed buried under the rubble of the Montana Hotel.

Volunteers from ZAKA —the Israeli organization that collects victims’ bodies for proper burial— recovered a body with the passport of the missing man.

For the last month, rotating teams from ZAKA, worked at the site of the Montana Hotel together with an American recovery delegation sent to the site to retrieve the bodies of 17 Americans known to have been in the hotel at the time of its collapse.

While many bodies have been recovered at the hotel, it was not until March 4 that the body of Alexandre Shmuel Bitton, 36, was discovered. The body was transferred to the United Nations facility near the Port-au- Prince airport for positive identification.

Bitton, an information technology consultant from Montreal, was making his first trip to Haiti and had just checked into the hotel when the earthquake hit on Jan. 12.

“Our mission is to make the utmost efforts – even if it is at the other end of the world – to ensure a full Jewish burial,” said ZAKA Chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav.