IDF officer pulls religious Jewish texts from rubble of Miami condo collapse
Death toll of Champlain Towers disaster rises to 79 with 61 people still missing
An image of an IDF search and rescue officer recovering a cache of religious Jewish texts from the rubble of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida has been circling social media.
Two weeks after the collapse of the Champlain Towers South apartment complex in Surfside, Florida, the IDF Home Front Command’s search-and-rescue delegation continues to work to find and pull bodies from the rubble, led by Col. Golan Vach.
A large number of the missing are from Miami’s Jewish community, and as seen in the photo shared by Bal Harbour Mayor Gabriel Groisman, Jewish texts were seen being recovered from the rubble – presenting a small representative image of the diverse population that once lived in the tower.
The image itself shows an Israeli search and rescue officer passing of a stack of religious Jewish books to a South Florida Urban Search and Rescue worker after pulling it from the carnage of the collapsed building.
“Israeli and South Florida Search and Rescue Teams working together to remove sacred Jewish books from the rubble at the Champlain Towers,” said Groisman. “So much symbolism
in this most powerful photograph.”
At the time, Vach and his team were focused on recovering the bodies of a Jewish couple who became submerged under the tons of concrete that fell on top of them, according to the Miami Herald.
Vach began finding personal effects belonging to the couple, “shreds of paper, notes and books,” the report stated. Then at one point, Vach noticed that a few of the books were from the Talmud and as he handed
off the texts to the South Florida search and rescue worker an observer captured an image of the exchange and shared it to social media – where it was picked up and shared by the mayor.
“It was special in this event to do your holy mission to get these things back to their families,” Vach told the Miami Herald.
“We are doing this with very much dignity, very much respect,” he added. “We are trying to do this mission the best we can.”
Groisman commented further on the find, stating that everyone at one point or another in their lives are “missing the physical items that they’ve lost in addition to the people they’ve lost,” he said, according to the Herald.
“In the Jewish religion, we keep these books in the house. When you fill your house with Jewish text, your house becomes a home. To see those in the rubble is symbolic of the lives lost.”
One of the United Hatzalah volunteers, Raphael Poch, is part of a team of search and rescue and psychological trauma experts sent from Israel to assist all the families, not just those who are Jewish, during this difficult time.
Poch told the Herald that the recovery of the Jewish texts are of great importance, noting that they are kept as significant keepsakes, especially after the Holocaust where many books connected to the Jewish religion were burned, never to be seen again.
“These are books Jewish people carried with them for thousands of years,” Poch told the Miami Herald.
Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 79 on Friday after workers extracted 14 more bodies from the ruins and said they had reduced the pile of debris down nearly to ground level.
The recovery left 61 people still missing and feared dead in the concrete and steel rubble of the 12-story oceanfront building, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.
Reuters contributed this report.•