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When the ground began to shake, Inbar Irron was among a dozen Israelis in Nepal who ran outside the building where they had been sitting, straight into a cloud of dust.

When their vision cleared, they saw a devastating scene: Much of the village of Manegau, where they had come to volunteer for four months, had crumbled to the ground. Miraculously, none of the villagers was hurt. But many of their homes had been reduced to rubble.

Irron’s group — sent by the Israeli NGO Tevel b’Tzedek, which organizes volunteer trips to Nepal — was there to set up a youth group, provide leadership workshops to women in the village, and bring Israeli agritech to its farms and computers to its schools.

Now that mission is on long-term hold. The volunteers and villagers have pitched plastic tents to weather the rainy nights, and hope their food stockpile will last until the road to Kathmandu reopens. The immediate task, Irron says, is to rebuild at least a few buildings and reassure the villagers.

Setting up the IDF field hospital in Kathmandu on April 28 photo/israeli defense forces

“Right now we’re trying to maintain calm and high motivation,” Irron said via satellite phone.

Approximately 2,000 Israelis were in Nepal when the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck on April 25, destroying buildings and roads across the country. By midweek, nearly 5,000 people had been confirmed dead, with more casualties expected as rescuers reach the remote villages closer to the quake’s epicenter.

Nepal is a popular destination for young Israelis, many of whom vacation there for weeks or months following mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces. That describes the one Israeli traveler who was still missing as of midweek. All others had been located, though some were still stranded.

Immediately after the quake hit, hundreds of Israeli backpackers and tourists took refuge at the Chabad center in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Some were given emergency medical treatment there as emissaries and volunteers worked frantically to help locate the missing, and to provide food and shelter to the stranded.

Chani Lifshitz, who co-directs Chabad of Nepal with her husband, Rabbi Chezki Lifshitz, said in a video posted to their Facebook page late on April 25 that a few hundred people had taken refuge at the center, which was slightly damaged by the quake. She tried to reassure loved ones in Israel and abroad.

 “We’re trying to calm everyone,” she said, noting that they were experiencing aftershocks even as she was recording the video. “We’re still gathering the names of the missing, and we’re trying to get in touch with everyone as urgently as possible,” she said.

Only weeks earlier, Chabad had provided a number of hikers with satellite phones so they could be reached in an emergency, and those phones provided a key link to some of the survivors after the quake. The phones are connected to a computer system at the Chabad center to locate users.

MDA paramedics Ravit Martinez (left) and Tal Rabin land in Tel Aviv with two surrogate Israeli babies from Nepal. photo/courtesy magen david adom

Working closely with the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Nepal, backpackers who served as medics in the IDF and local volunteers administered emergency medical treatment to the injured at the Chabad house. The injured were later transferred to the Israeli Embassy, which moved into high gear transporting Israelis home.

Several Israeli missions landed in Nepal early in the week to provide medical care, assist search efforts and distribute humanitarian aid. An IDF delegation arrived on April 27 to set up a field hospital, while staff from Magen David Adom, a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, fanned out across Kathmandu’s hospitals to care for Israelis and treat the quake’s 11,000 estimated wounded.

Dr. Rafi Strugo, who is heading the MDA team, called Kathmandu “an atmosphere of chaos.”

“In these missions, you need to understand, and it’s hard to understand, that you won’t be able to do everything and help everyone,” Strugo, who also treated wounded in Nepal after the 2013 avalanche in Annapurna, said via satellite phone. “The dimensions of the tragedy, the dimensions of the destruction, are so big that you can’t contain it all.”

As rescue efforts intensified, some Israelis remained stranded far from Kathmandu.

Members of a group of 10 Israelis hiking in Langtang National Park, 40 miles from Kathmandu, found each other after the quake and worked together to survive. According to Elfie Sharabi, one of the hiker’s mothers, the group built a small shelter out of bamboo to use during the aftershocks and cleared out a large open space in case a helicopter needed to land to rescue them.

Sharabi’s daughter, Shani, has a satellite phone, so parents across Israel and the world have been calling Sharabi in hopes of locating their own children who went missing in Langtang. Together, Elfie and Shani Sharabi helped some 40 adult children in Langtang contact their parents.

But as her phone number spread across social media, Elfie Sharabi was deluged with messages from other people with relatives across Nepal. On April 27, when she spoke to JTA, Sharabi was attempting to answer 175 WhatsApp messages and 250 emails.

“What’s good about it is because I have to communicate with so many other people, I don’t have time,” Sharabi said. “I am usually a major worrier. I don’t have time to allow myself to start thinking. I spend so much time trying to calm other people and be positive, I guess it’s rubbing off on me, too.”