by Justine Hemmestad
12-7-23
On October 7th, a massacre took place in 22 locations of southern Israel at the same time. The premeditated atrocities that Hamas carried out amounted to the worst violence and pain inflicted on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As if the bodies of Jewish women represented the nation of Israel, Hamas members viciously raped them, and tortured and killed Jewish men and women indiscriminately. To compound the onslaught of pain and death, the UN Women having taken so long to acknowledge the horror of Jewish women was yet another abandonment. Israeli women not only live with the nightmare of what has already been inflicted upon them, but also with what has been promised to happen to them again if Hamas isn’t stopped. As a direct result of October 7 Israelis have lost faith in their government, which failed to protect them as they were put in place to do. The entire state of Israel is meant to be a safe haven for Jews after the horrors of the holocaust. But Israelis feel that Netanyahu turned a blind eye on Hamas for an irreparable amount of time, and that he did so in order to focus on his own interests, which resulted in October 7. My friend Itamar Ben David, a reserve Captain in the IDF, found the time to send me a video of one volunteer’s account of her work in the aftermath of October 7. In the video, Journalist Caroline Glick sits down with Avigail Gimpel - educator, author and burial society volunteer - to talk about what she saw as she cleansed female bodies for burial. Avigail, and other burial society volunteers, had been called to prepare the bodies for burial that had been recovered by Zaka volunteers (Disaster Victim Identification), in accordance to Jewish custom. After cleansing the bodies they were wrapped in linens to be buried. Avigail says the “fire in her belly” is to tell the world what happened to her Jewish brothers and sisters is what has carried her since . She says all the bodies on that day had been brutalized. A team of archaeologists had to also be called in some cases to help with identification. “You can’t prepare for this job,” Avigail says. Sometimes all the burial workers had to work with were small bags of ashes of Jewish babies, sisters, mothers…and she had to figure out a way not to lose any of those ashes (calling to mind Aushuwitz crematoriums). The amount of care used in recovering the bodies, or incomplete bodies, of the October 7th horror goes far beyond processing a normal crime scene. As they prepare the bodies they gain an understanding of what happened to the person, and what that person had gone through in their final moments. She says that just by the positions their bodies were in, she could tell that they were in severe agony when they died. “It was a sadistic attack… there were multiple wounds,” she says of each person. Avigail says that according to Jewish law they cannot even lose a drop of blood, which made her job extremely difficult and heartbreaking because most of the women were so bloody from their numerous wounds (she had to pick women up and hold them close to her in an effort not to lose anything of them - including the body parts that had been disconnected). There was no precedent for the job of the burial volunteers, but they had to learn as they went along. “Every body was prepared in the cleanest way possible,” Avigail says. Strikingly, Avigail also makes the point to say that all of the jewelry of the women had been stolen. She says of Hamas, “They caused so much pain to our people, then when they were done they didn’t leave without their prize of jewelry.” Avigail worked to prepare the women for burial every day for a week. Yet, there were still bodies that could not be identified (about 20%). “The last rite that we as Jews have is to bury our dead and in some cases that won’t happen,” she says. She also wants people to have clarity about the war: “this is not about a piece of land or any philosophical ideas - this is a war between evil and good…this was a level of evil that you can’t wash out of your eyes. People need to understand that there is no justification for this kind of evil, and that’s what we’re facing. We have to stay clear.”
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