In modern day Israel, in response to the increasing amount terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, a group of haredi civilian paramedics created a Chesed shel Emet organization to manage the identification and burial of the mutilated bodies from these attacks. As many of the attacks in the 1990s and 2000s were suicide bombings, the bodies of the victims were often in pieces and difficult to identify.
Traditionally, a Chesed shel Emet organization manages the burial of people who's family's cannot afford their burial. The core value behind the organization is that all Jews deserve to be buried according the Jewish customs whether or not they can afford it. The innovation of Zaka was that they would specialize in collecting the body parts of the victims of gruesome terrorist attacks and also identifying who the body parts belonged to. From this the organization got its name, Zaka, which is an acronym for zihui korbanot ason, or terrorist attack victims identification.
Zaka fills an important niche in the emergency response to terrorist attacks in the country. Generally civilian EMS are only trained to collect generally in tact corpses, while the army coroners can deal with identifying are collecting the mutilated remains of its soldiers since each soldier has a detailed medical record that can be quickly referenced for identification of the body. Zaka specializes in mangled civilian bodies who are more difficult to identify quickly since detailed medical records are harder to get on short notice.
Zaka was born out of the haredi community's volunteer EMS service, hatzala, which means that all Zaka personnel are volunteers since the organization operates on much the same model of dispatching.
Yesterday, on Nov. 21, 2023, the day that all the YU student organizations planned something. (and i mean all, there were like 7 events all planned at about the same time that night, it was kind of wild, but they all wanted to get events done before Thanksgiving.) A senior member of Zaka from Ashdod visited YU on his fundraising tour. Though not mentioned so directly during his talk, the money he was collecting seemed to be intended to fund mental health treatment for all the volunteers who assisted in collecting and identifying the victims of the October 7th massacres. Though I presume Zaka probably needed funding to also generally replenish their supplies that we no doubt exhausted.
The dynamic of him fundraising felt a little uncomfortable to me, since he had to relive the horrors he witnessed while cleaning up in order to evoke our pity to donate to his organization. Of course he probably agreed out of his own free will and dedication to his noble organization, but nevertheless the dynamic seemed a little improper. The memories of the events should definitely be relayed, but they shouldn't be bought. Though I will stress that I assume the person who spoke volunteered to do this and was more than willing to relay his experiences, the principle of matter is what seems to be slightly bothering me.
I'll put my cynical criticism here in the middle, because I want to end on a more wholesome perspective. Almost all the people who I have heard discuss the current situation in the Jewish community point to a situation of great unity or achdut. However, each faction of Israeli Jewish society is optimistic that the other factions will soften their hardline stance on certain issues. When I heard from the rabbis who visited from Har Eztion, they were optimistic that the charedim would become more willing to serve in the army and support the nationalist vision of a Jewish future. The member of Zaka was himself charedi and his perspective was a little different. The charedim see their main opponents as the secular Jews who are trying to remove the religious aspects of general government policy like allowing public transportation to run on shabbat and the like. After interacting with the some of the relatives of the victims who were secular, he felt hopeful that they would adopt a more open attitude to their charedi neighbors and potentially become more connected to Orthodox Judaism. The Zaka member even requested that we try to donate a Sefer Torah to the secular kibbutsim who were attacked to assist them in the process of returning to religion.
As part of his address, the Zaka member relayed some of his memories of what happened on October 7 and his team's involvement in the recovery of bodies. I do not remember all the details that relayed, and I don't really want to get too graphic, especially since he was clearly self censoring and not relaying the most disturbing of the details. One of the analogies he used to describe what it was like to enter the houses of the people who were murdered was that the bodies and the walls of the houses talked to you. He repeated this several times. It struck me because this is exactly how Disco Elysium portrays the experience of examining and identifying the mangled corpse of a murdered person. This Zaka member and the writers of Disco Elysium never interacted, so at that moment I knew that the Disco Elysium writers had that seen spot on. They clearly were writing from experience of what its like to examine a corpse like that. Unless I enter a profession that professionally deals with victims of murder, I will never be able to really understand what the person from Zaka or what Disco Elysium meant by the analogy. However, I suspect that when you observe a corpse in situ, exactly at is was when its life was brutally ripped from it, you can immediately spot the clues of how it happened. Whether or not your immediate conclusions of how the murder happened are correct, the bodies and the spilled blood still talk to you, they are trying to explain how it was that they ended up in this mess, but they are mute, for dead man can no longer speak, their lips are frozen.
The next detail was one that I get very emotional thinking about. Part of Zaka's protocol is to collect all pieces of human remains, included residue of blood to be buried in the ground according to Jewish law. While they clean and collect the blood and other dismembered body parts, they also work to clean the house to restore it to a livable condition. Apparently, in one house while they were cleaning, one the Zaka team members complained, what's the point of cleaning up this house. The team leader who visited YU responded that the point was to collect the blood to bring it to kever yisrael (Jewish burial) and to allow the family to return to the house. He responded, they're all dead, there's no one to return to the house.
And if someone’s kinsman . . . comes to carry the remains out of the house, and he calls to the one at the rear of the house, “Are there any alive besides you?” the answer will be, “No, none.” And he will say, “Hush!”—so that no one may utter GOD’s name. (Amos 6:10)
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