Posted on 08/12/2002 4:15:21 AM PDT by Alouette
JERUSALEM–The instinct is to flee. Yet these men–they are all men, these Orthodox Jews in their black skullcaps–are drawn to the carnage of the bombings.
In this tiny nation where no place seems safe anymore–certainly not the buses or the food stands along Hanevi'im Street or even the cafeteria crossroads of the Hebrew University–more and more Israelis wander through their lives with an eye over the shoulder, looking to see if their final hour is gaining on them. Not Natan Koenig. In the near 100-degree afternoon heat at Hebrew University last month, Koenig sat on his haunches, blotting the black-red circle of blood spread wide across the hard tile floor of the cafeteria where seven people, five Americans among them, had just lost their lives. The 25-year-old is one of 604 Jewish men, all but 34 of them Orthodox, who are members of ZAKA, Israel's volunteer Disaster Victims Identification team. They collect human remains for burial, fulfilling the Jewish mitzvah, or commandment, of showing "respect for the dead."
Calming refrain. Koenig handed sheets of blood-drenched absorbent paper to a coworker, who placed them in a plastic bag for burial with one of the victims; according to Jewish tradition, a person's soul resides in his blood. His work done, Koenig pulled the surgical gloves–the fingertips stained with blood–from his hands, found his car, and drove himself home. After such an ordeal, he often sings a melody he knows will make him cry: a Hebrew religious song with the refrain "God will have mercy." Says Koenig: "By the time I get home, I'm calm."
Who does such work? When not immersed in this ritual of death, Koenig embraces the rituals of love and life: A caterer by trade, his days are a succession of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Yet for three years he has been drawn to the grisly task that most Israelis are glad to see done but want no part of. Despite crackdowns by the Israeli government, the violence continues. Just last week there were two bombings and three shootings in a single day, killing at least 15 people.
The men of ZAKA have become the new heroes of Israel's ultra-Orthodox minority. Their unofficial leader is Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the notorious "field commander" of the ultra-Orthodox "street." Before taking over ZAKA in the mid-1990s, Meshi-Zahav, 42, his face like a leprechaun's, organized wild demonstrations in Jerusalem with tens of thousands of haredim, as these fanatically devout Jews are called in Hebrew. His legions stoned passing cars for "desecrating" the Sabbath and burned bus stops that featured "pornographic" fashion ads. Now, with ZAKA, Meshi-Zahav has gone respectable.
As a rule, ultra-Orthodox men–though they are hawkish–don't serve in the Army, seeing it as a corrupter of morals, and don't work, drawing government stipends for lifelong study in religious schools. The Israeli mainstream–including many of the "modern Orthodox" who work for a living, serve in the Army, and even volunteer in ZAKA–views them as social parasites. But by performing the most horrific task imaginable at the site of terror attacks, ZAKA has won a measure of admiration for the ultra-Orthodox from the rest of Israeli society. "I do it because there's religious value in the work," says Yitzhak Shalita, a computer programmer. "It's about showing respect for the dead." But for the volunteers, it is more than that. It is also their way of serving in the war, and even of proving their manhood. "We're the machos of the community," boasts ZAKA member Shlomo Bloch. He likens the group to an "elite Army unit."
In its way, perhaps. When a bomb goes off, the Hebrew acronym "ERAN"–for "multicasualty incident"–flashes on the beepers that ZAKA volunteers like Bloch carry wherever they go. En route, they place flashing blue "Kojak" police lights on the roofs of their cars and fly to the scene. In their black yarmulkes and yellow reflector vests, they slip past the police lines–they are officially an auxiliary of the Israeli police force–and begin the work that will last for hours.
First night. For every volunteer, there is a first encounter with a scene of death. On his first job, after the March suicide bombing of Jerusalem's Moment cafe that killed 11 people, Shalita, 25, worked for five hours, well into the middle of the night. He got to the cafe a few minutes after the explosion, before the survivors could even begin to wail. The only sound was the ring of cellular phones.
"The walls were covered with blood," he recalls. "There were broken tables, plates, salads all over the floor, total chaos. People were lying in a pile, one on top of the other, in a pool of blood." He saw a woman seated on a chair at the bar, elbow on the counter, head resting in her palm. A man sat next to her with his hand on the bar as if holding a glass. Their eyes were open. "They looked as if nothing was wrong with them," Shalita says. But they were frozen in death. Shalita doesn't remember thinking or feeling much during that first night, just the sensation of mechanically taking on one task after another: covering corpses with black plastic bags, using a plasterer's knife to collect parts of bodies, and blotting the blood.
Some volunteers quit after such an ordeal. But Shalita didn't. And for those who do stay, the job can become an addiction. Shalita says he now sleeps with his beeper by his pillow and even takes it to the beach. When, on a recent night, a message flashed, he says he felt "a current go through my body." Before joining ZAKA, Koenig hadn't been able to stand the sight of blood and got queasy at the sight of a needle. Now, says his wife, Talia, he has grown "elephant skin." She says there have been stretches in the past three years when ZAKA seemed to be the "main thing, even the only thing, that mattered to him."
The men sustain one another with a kind of black humor that is both inappropriate and essential. On the night of last month's attack at Hebrew University, some two dozen volunteers who'd worked the bombing drove to one of Jerusalem's poor ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, where they crowded into a harshly lit, underground bomb shelter made even more claustrophobic by its low ceiling. This is ZAKA's local equipment room and clubhouse, and the men had come for a debriefing. Even after the day's ordeal, many of the men still had the stomach to eat: A couple of them brought what looked like the full contents of a Jewish bakery–danishes, cheese pastries called burekas, and cookies–and set the sweets on the table. Some of the early arrivals talked shop.
Letting off steam. The men, most wearing beards and dressed in the austere, black-and-white attire of ultra-Orthodox Jews, argued about the pitfalls of parking their vans close to the scene, of unloading enough stretchers, of getting past paranoid police officers. Everyone roared at once, grabbing each other's gesturing hands to make a point, laughing heartily and often. "These debriefings help them cope," says Alan Cohen, a British-born Israeli psychologist who conducts group therapy sessions for them. "Black humor allows them to talk about subjects that they wouldn't discuss literally, but which they have to discuss." These pious volunteers, he adds, remind him of "hardened cops."
Not all of them are so tough. Though most believe deeply in what they're doing and develop a strong sense of belonging to the brotherhood, burnout is common among the men who can't find an outlet for what they see and touch and smell. Meshi-Zahav said volunteers typically reach their limit after about 18 months. One man, an elementary school teacher, recently reached his limit when he took his class on a field trip to a cemetery; afterward he was told gently to hand in his beeper and get psychological help. To keep them sane, ZAKA occasionally treats the team to a day out. Recently about 150 volunteers took over a nearby hotel where they took turns tossing one another into the pool. "It's important that we get to know each other in good times, too," says Bloch. "Otherwise every one of those faces only reminds you of the angel of death."
On hellish nights, Bloch needs to escape even his comrades and will drive all night on an open highway. One time, the high-strung religious school student found himself in the lobby of a hotel at the Dead Sea, about an hour from Jerusalem, and couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. "I felt 50 pounds lighter," says Bloch, "like I'd gotten all the tears and bad dreams out of me."
I thought this gratuitous nasty little swipe was wholly unnecessary.
I couldn't agree more. What a great insight!
And, who cares about the cost! Please Guys put an appeal together and see if we can't get a FRee Republic Ambulance there!!
Perhaps it's time to build and maintain a *FReeper's MDA Ambulance* ping list. FTY, I'm working on the possibility of donated free shipping of such a donation to Israel by airplane should such a donation come to pass.
But it's certainly a needed and useful item....
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