Every Dog Has His Day

The world got to know the heroic canine who tracked down Baghdadi after President Trump shared a declassified portrait of the dog, having since recovered from injuries sustained after being electrocuted in the chase. And it highlighted just how important trained dogs can be — a first line of defense for many top-secret security missions. These dogs might parachute out of planes, descend by rope out of helicopters with their handlers, and are sometimes fitted with night-vision goggles and a video camera in the search for their target.

Trump’s hero, a Belgian Malinois (the dog’s name remains classified as he’s still in service), looks strikingly like Eisha, a search-and-rescue dog of the same breed, who lives in a kennel in the Israeli Shomron town of Kfar Tapuach and obeys commands given in Hebrew, English… and Yiddish. And Eisha has her own track record of saving lives. She’s a veteran member of the Israel Dog Unit, a civilian security and search-and-rescue organization that works independently yet often alongside the IDF and the police, and enlists a cadre of highly-trained volunteers that include foreign students and even yeshivah bochurim.

Eishaleh, as she’s affectionately called — part of an elite squad of security dogs trained to participate in search and rescue of missing persons, help secure the periphery of outlying communities, and protect Jewish civilians from would-be assailants — hasn’t yet been involved in the high-profile assassination of an international arch-terrorist, but she’s a true hero for families whose loved-ones she’s saved. One of those people was an Argentinian immigrant living in Ashkelon who was down on his luck and became severely depressed after being fired from his factory job. He took a bottle of Arak and some pills and disappeared. The family hadn’t been able to contact him for two days.

“The police called us, because they know our volunteers will stay on the shetach until we find a body, dead or alive.” says Dog Unit founder and director Mike (Yekutiel) Ben Yaakov, with his big black yarmulke and tzitzis dangling from underneath his “Dog Unit” uniform shirt. “We know that there’s a lot of room between contemplating suicide and actually going through with it, and we also know that the first three days are critical for finding a person alive. Our staff of volunteers searched through the night in a forested area outside the city, but right before we were about to pack up and move locations, I spotted a cluster of abandoned houses and decided to check it out, with Eishaleh at my side. Well, we get to this structure, and she’s going crazy, so I sent her in through a broken window — and she found him, unconscious but still alive. Today he’s so grateful that we saved him, he even came to the kennels to meet Eisha in person.