jerusalem | On the once-beautiful beaches of Thailand, Israeli aid workers are engaged in a nightmarish task — identifying bodies of the dead and helping survivors of the devastating tsunami.
“It’s like what Noah must have seen after the Great Flood,” said Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, chairman of the Zaka (disaster victims identification) unit that flew to Thailand to help. Zaka is a volunteer group in Israel that collects the bodies and body parts of victims from suicide bombings.
Meshi-Zahav was on Kaulak Beach in Phuket a short distance from where 1,000 bodies of tsunami victims were waiting to be identified.
Working with the Zaka team are Chabad representatives in Thailand. Rabbi Nechemia Wilhelm, a Chabad emissary in the area, said, “Ten minutes after the disaster hit, my phone started ringing. It’s been ringing ever since, 24 hours a day. Husbands looking for wives. Mothers looking for daughters. Friends looking for their traveling companions.
“When I arrived in Phuket the bloated bodies still lined the streets. We had hundreds of names on our lists, with new ones being added every hour. For three days now I have been making my rounds of the morgues, hospitals and makeshift shelters, trying to match faces and fates to the names in my lists.”
Said Meshi-Zahav, “It will take months to match dental records, fingerprints and DNA samples, long after the bodies are buried or cremated by the Thai authorities.”
The Israeli team has won much praise and admiration from foreign delegations seeking to identify the bodies of their nationals, according to Meshi-Zahav.
The fervently religious Zaka volunteers no longer look strange to the foreigners and locals — despite their beards, and the black kippot, white shirts and black trousers that are the common uniform of the haredi crew. The volunteers also wear yellow plastic coverings for sanitary reasons.
Although they have hotel rooms a few hours’ distance from Kaulak, they spend no more than three hours at a time sleeping, Meshi-Zahav said. “There is so much to do, we are working around the clock.” And even if they had more rest time, they are unlikely to be physically able to sleep longer, given the ghoulish, tragic scenes.
The bodies are now refrigerated, but the smell of decomposition penetrates everything. “It sticks to you; now we hardly notice it. If we can return home sane, then we are very strong.
“The Thais don’t cry. Because of their religion, they seem to have a different view of death. They believe in fate. I know they worship Buddha, so they’re idol worshippers, but they are very pleasant. They don’t blame God for what has happened to them. They are very religious in their own way. But they are very helpful and have been treating us very well. They bow to us out of respect. They come with their children to bring food for the teams.”
Wilhelm, the Chabad rabbi, spoke of specific tragedies. On Dec. 28, “we found Mattan. We searched for him for two days. The 11-month-old boy was torn from his mother’s arms as they played on the beach. Both she and her husband survived the tsunami, but Mattan was nowhere to be seen.”
The next day, “Steve and Sylvia Nesima found their son. He was in the makeshift morgue along with the hundreds of other children who had no chance against the monstrous waves. Mattan was flown to Bangkok where Chabad emissaries took turns sitting with him, around the clock, until they put his small body on the El Al plane to Israel, the Holy Land, the only appropriate place where such purity and innocence can be buried.”
“The survivors come to us shaken, hungry and overwhelmed. They need to go home and be with their family. Until that is possible, it is our responsibility to provide them with that love, comfort and safety while they are still here. For some that means a warm meal, others need money and arrangements for necessary travel documents, some a hug or shoulder to cry on, and others a place to sleep.”
However, the Chabad rabbi also spoke of the uplifting aspects.
“On a larger scale, this disaster has brought people of every race, creed and religion together. There are no divisions in suffering. There are no barriers. Rich, poor, young, old, male, female, were all the same in the eyes of the waves. And now, once again, are all the same when it comes to offering aid, support and love.
“What keeps us going are the miracles that are sprinkled throughout the horror. Today a 20-day-old baby was found alive, floating upon a mattress in the water. A
1-year-old who was torn from his mother’s arms was miraculously recovered by his nanny, seconds before he was submerged in water. A Jewish family of six were scheduled to fly to Ko Phi Phi, the hardest hit of the islands; we feared the worst for them, until we learned that they had missed their flight and were sitting on the runway bemoaning their ruined vacation when the news broke”
The Zaka team members don’t have a minyan for reciting prayers, so they do so individually, putting their tefillin on in the morning and then going to work. They even worked on Shabbat, doing things that former Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said they were allowed to do after having a meal and singing Shabbat songs under the cloud of the horror around them.
Asked whether he understood the magnetic attraction that drew so many young Israelis to Thailand, Meshi-Zahav said: “We look up and see palm trees, coconuts and monkeys in the trees, but we look down and see cadavers. I asked the Chabadniks what was here before, and they said it was a spiritual hell, but now it is a physical hell.”
Back in their home in Jerusalem’s Sanhedria Murhevet section, Meshi-Zahav’s wife, Batsheva, is worried about him. “She cried yesterday over the phone,” he said sadly, “but by now she knows how important this work is and how it’s part of my personality.”
For more information on Zaka, go to www.zakausa.org.