ISRAEL UNDER SIEGE : Burial Teams Again Face Grim, Sacred Duty of Retrieving Remains

Israelis call their work “the sacred mission.” It is a job many people would find revolting, and lately it is one that the volunteers of Hesed shel Emet have been forced to practice with sickening regularity.

There they were again Monday night, fanning out across the scene of the latest terrorist bombing, this one in the heart of Tel Aviv, moving in to literally pick up the pieces after rescue crews evacuated the wounded.

With each large-scale terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, Hesed shel Emet crews mobilize right along with the professionals--the ambulance drivers, medics, soldiers and police. But the volunteers keep their distance while rescue workers extract the wounded. Then they move in and begin their meticulous search for the dead--or rather, for remnants of the dead.

Founded by an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Elazar Gelbstein, Hesed shel Emet--the name means “Grace of Truth”--is an organization dedicated to ensuring that as much as possible of the blasted remains of every human killed in a mass attack is recovered and buried.

“In the Torah it is written: You shall bury him on the day he dies,” Gelbstein said during an interview in his Jerusalem office Monday, just hours before the Tel Aviv bombing, the fourth such attack in Israel in nine days. “We are commanded to give respect to the body of man, because God created man in his image.”

That simple notion--that the body of a human must be treated with reverence--has led the 180 mostly ultra-Orthodox members of Gelbstein’s volunteer society to climb trees, scour balconies, swab air-conditioning units and collect minuscule pieces of glass coated with drops of blood in a herculean effort to ensure that all human remains--Jewish or not--are laid to rest.

In Tel Aviv on Monday, Avishai Nagar, a nurse who was running errands when the bomb went off, rushed to help the Hesed shel Emet volunteers in their grim task.

“You just have to do it, you have to help,” said Nagar as he rubbed cotton balls across a motorcycle, soaking them with blood and dropping them into a plastic bag. “You want each body piece you find to be the last one, but then there is another and another, and it is not the last one and there is yet another. But we mustn’t leave body parts and blood lying around. It has to be buried.”

After Sunday’s bombing on Jerusalem’s No. 18 bus, a bearded Hesed shel Emet volunteer could be seen being hoisted aloft in the crow’s nest of a city tree-trimming truck, calmly cleaning tissue off building facades along Jaffa Road, where the blast occurred. Others picked through debris in each of the shops whose windows were blown out by the explosion, searching for tiny pieces of flesh or drops of blood.

Their dedication leaves many Israelis--even those otherwise hostile to the ultra-Orthodox--slightly in awe. Gelbstein had a letter from Prime Minister Shimon Peres on his desk Monday, thanking him and his volunteers for their assistance and asking to meet with him soon.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that the last blood that leaves the body contains the soul, Gelbstein explained.

“When you see a person who only a minute ago left his family, his social circle, his work, who just left everything that surrounds a man and suddenly, in the blink of an eye, it is all finished, you try with all your will to reconstruct this person,” Gelbstein said. “You cannot get into this person’s spiritual parts, but you try to reconstruct the physical side, the body of the man. You try to find everything that belongs to him.”

Gelbstein and his crews rely on donations and their own money to buy their simple supplies. In his car, Gelbstein said, he keeps disposable rubber gloves, cotton balls, tweezers, small brooms and large plastic bags. He has a police walkie-talkie and a beeper with him at all times.

The organization was founded in 1989, Gelbstein said, after a Palestinian grabbed the wheel of a commuter bus as it drove on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, plunging the bus into a ravine and killing 40 people. Gelbstein requires volunteers to attend at least 50 lectures by members of the burial society and police investigators before allowing them to work after a bombing.

Gelbstein turns up at attack sites to direct his crews. When a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated a powerful charge on Jerusalem’s No. 18 bus on Feb. 25, Gelbstein heard the explosion in his home, two miles away.

“I said: ‘Oy! No! Let it not be.’ But I knew what it was,” said the bearded, green-eyed rabbi, who is employed full time by Jerusalem’s burial society. In Israel, Jewish burials are under the strict supervision of the chief rabbinate and must be conducted according to Jewish law. That means that the dead are buried on the day they die, whenever possible, and that their bodies are wrapped only in a shroud and not encased in a coffin, in keeping with the biblical injunction: “From the earth you came, and to the earth you shall return.”

Gelbstein said he could hardly believe it when his wife awakened him Sunday and said his police walkie-talkie carried reports of another bombing on the No. 18 route.

Attacks are occurring so frequently that the organization--with branches in Jerusalem and the ultra-Orthodox community of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv--plans to open offices in the north and the south of the country.

Gelbstein said his volunteers include members of the various ultra-Orthodox sects, and some identified with the national religious movement. Only men are allowed to join, and they must be married because they will be collecting female as well as male body parts. Observant Jews consider it immodest for unmarried men to perform such a task.

The latest attacks in Jerusalem, Ashkelon and Tel Aviv have spurred a flood of offers from people to join Hesed shel Emet, Gelbstein said. But he added that he has no money to pay for training. The government, he said, offers no financial support.

One of the group members who is not ultra-Orthodox is Itamar Warhaftig, an instructor at Bar Ilan University’s faculty of law. Sunday’s bombing was his third as a volunteer.

“I must detach myself from what I am seeing when I am on the site,” Warhaftig said. “I only do the job. I pick up the pieces, I put them in my bag. Only later, at night sometimes, I think and I have trouble sleeping. But then I tell myself to close those feelings.”

Times staff writer Curtius reported from Jerusalem, special correspondent Hauser from Tel Aviv.