by Justine Hemmestad
3-14-24
Last week I had the honor of talking to Professor, Special Educator, and two time author, Avigail Gimpel, over Zoom from her home in Israel. Gimpel’s focus is on ADHD and her website, hyperhealing. org offers a quiz in which to “discover the causes of your ADHD symptoms and how to eliminate them.” She helps both children and adults with ADHD - those who may have tried medications, OT, PT speech therapy, ADHD coaching, but who still struggle - truly, a world-wide issue. Gimpel has written two books on the subject: Hyper Healing - Show Me the Science; and Hyper Healing - the Empowered Parent’s Complete Guide to Raising a Healthy Child with ADHD Symptoms, both available on Amazon. I’ve written before about Gimpel’s deeply moving interview with Caroline Glick as part of the series Israel at War, but to interview her personally was an incredible gift. Gimpel and her husband are both part of the Burial Society in Israel, in which they prepare bodies for burial according to Jewish custom and care. Gimpel told me that she began volunteering exactly one week after the massacre in which 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered and “very, very badly mutilated…a lot of burns.” In fact, she says, there were times when “we didn’t know how many people were in a certain burnt pile…they were burnt tied together…” Since Jewish law is very strict on burial, “the amount of respect given to a dead body is very high and very specific.” The volunteers wanted to make sure that everyone was identified and the body was well cared for, and then buried. “Men took care of mens’ bodies and women took care of womens’ bodies.” “It took them a week to start identifying bodies.” By that point, there were hundreds of bodies, she said. Gimpel was part of a six-woman team, all of them strong and more than capable of the work they had been called upon to do. The sights she saw were horrifying, but she says that rather than feeling repulsed, her “mamma bear” instinct came out. She just wanted “to care for these girls, these mothers, these grandmothers.” She saw people. Gimpel always checked the names, but not the ages because she felt that knowing their ages would “destroy” her. “They were my daughters’ ages, or younger,” she utters. She and her co-workers always apologized to their slain Jewish sisters by name while taking care of them, if perhaps the roughness of movement became too great. She and her team worked for a week to prepare the women’s bodies for burial. In this time, she and her husband came home every night to their own children, careful that their own grief for what they had seen remained concealed to themselves, though strengthening each other as they needed to. Even when they had completed their work there were still bodies left to be buried, too burnt beyond any sense of humanity. Gimpel says that forensics experts worked for weeks to identify even the smallest bone. She says, “They did heroic work, but some people will never be buried.” Of her family, Gimpel’s son was called to duty after October 7 and has already served in Gaza, where he fought “valiantly with his brothers and sisters in arms.” He is currently deployed to Israel’s northern border. She says that when he was serving in Gaza, there wasn’t one house that he and his comrades went into that didn’t have jihadi material, including maps that delete Israel, promoting the message of wiping Jews off the earth. “The [antisemitic] pictures are on every single wall,” with Mein Kampf among the household books. It’s a message that is not getting out in the media. When I told Gimpel that I have friends in Israel (especially my friend Itamar Ben David), and people that I’ve met while doing this series, who have told me that the media representation of Israel and Jews is just not true, she assured me that even the pictures the media shows as news are incorrect. The pictures that show people in war zones do not depict Gazans, she says, but “most of it is old pictures from Syria.” If there’s a message to be carried away from this interview, this is it: “There are no starving children here [Gaza],” Gimpel says. “This is more propaganda. Those are old pictures from other conflicts.” She says, “Jews do not do that to people…there’s more food going in now than there was before the war, but they keep messing with the numbers. Hamas is counting not dead bodies, and not starving children.” Gimpel also poignantly noted that Ramadan is approaching but Jews are being told to sit back and allow the celebrations to take place - even though the celebrations rely on killing Jews. She said it would seem as though people want “Jewish sacrifices.” Of life after October 7, Gimpel says that she and her family try to “lay low and carry our firearms wherever we go.” A commercial that ran during the Oscars dramatized a bomb threat to a synagogue during a bar mitzvah, causing the worshiping Jews within to flee. They were then sheltered in a neighboring church. The message is to come together in love, not hate. Like the commercial depicts, this is done in our own communities
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