Rabbi Mourns Loss of Wife Killed in Hit-and-Run

Like most mornings in her 76 years, Soltan Netaneli on Tuesday awoke her husband, a prominent rabbi, covered her hair and began her daily half-mile trek to Torat Hayim Valley synagogue. She left before sunrise without her husband to say a special prayer for Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of the Jewish month of Heshvan.

But while crossing Ventura Boulevard at the marked Newcastle Avenue crosswalk, a car struck and killed her. The driver did not stop.

A fragment of reflector glass, which police say came off a 1980 or 1981 Chevy Malibu, is the best lead investigators have.

The car, which is white, “is going to have front-end damage, the [left] headlight and the parking light . . . and there’s probably grill damage,” said Det. Jim Deaton of LAPD’s Valley Traffic Division. “There might be windshield damage too.

“We need a witness who has a good description of the driver. We need a good license plate number. We need something. This is a very, very tough case.”

A day after his wife’s death, Rabbi Farajollah Netaneli sat with relatives Wednesday, praying for insight into his loss.

“My wife Soltan Netaneli was going to synagogue . . . “ the Iranian-born rabbi wrote on a reporter’s notebook in hard-won English. “A car hit her and ran away. My wife fell down and got heart attack. She was taken to Tarzana Hospital and there passed away at 7:45 a.m.”

The disconsolate rabbi, his back bowed by age and his hair white under his yarmulke, declined to say anything more.

“He says he can’t understand how this could happen to such a holy woman on her way to synagogue on a holy day,” said Ishak Ishakian, the rabbi’s son-in-law.

“He says without her he can’t live. She cooked for him and washed clothes and woke him up in the morning because he can’t hear the alarm. She gave him his medicine. She cleaned. She talked to him. She was his best friend.”

The Netanelis married in Iran 51 years ago and opened Jewish schools in the cities of Shiraz and Tehran, that nation’s capital. Rabbi Asher Hakakha of Torat Hayim Valley said the Netanelis were well-known among Jews in Iran, where for more than 30 years their schools educated thousands of youths. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the couple moved to Jerusalem to escape religious persecution by fundamentalist Muslims, Ishakian said.

There the rabbi and his wife again formed the core of a community of Persian Jews, Ishakian said.

Ishakian said the couple made their first trip to the United States in 1981 when he married their only daughter. The Netanelis were asked to stay and organize the growing community of Iranian Jews in the San Fernando Valley, Ishakian said.

A Netaneli Hebrew Academy and a Netaneli Synagogue, both in the Valley, are named in the rabbi’s honor, and Hakakha said the rabbi still teaches classes on the Torah.

Soltan, who was killed four days before she was to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen, was known in the community for her piety and devotion to her husband. The mother of three rabbi sons, all ministering in Israel, she often played host to well-known Israeli rabbis and Jewish scholars.

She is survived by six grandchildren in Los Angeles and six more in Israel.

Netaneli will be buried Friday in an old Jerusalem cemetery called the Mountain of Rest, family members said.

The rabbi will not be there.

“He can’t tolerate it. He can’t see when she is buried over there,” Ishakian said. “He says, ‘My holy temple has been destroyed.’ ”