Layers of Loss

On Sunday this week, for the first time in ten days of feverish rescue efforts, silence fell over the grim mound of pancaked concrete that is the site of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. The exhausted rescue teams, who’ve cycled in and out of 12-hour shifts, stepped back from the ocean-front disaster zone. They watched as the jagged-edged remains of Champlain Towers South trembled and then collapsed in on themselves in a cloud of dust as engineers demolished the remaining wing due to safety concerns.

Among the hundreds of rescue workers forced to stop their work for a few hours was Colonel (Res.) Golan Vach, commander of Israel’s National Rescue Unit, a division of the IDF’s Home Front Command. A veteran of previous international disaster-scene deployments, he’s taken part in the Home Front Command’s rescue missions after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2013 Philippines typhoon, the 2017 Mexico earthquake, the 2019 Brazil dam disaster, and the 2019 earthquake in Albania.

Within hours of the building’s collapse, and as it became clear that dozens of Jews, including Israelis, had been in the building, a call went out for Israel to send its rescue teams. In one video that surfaced after the disaster, a Jewish woman begged a Miami official to bring in the Israelis: “They know what they’re doing, because they have to deal with emergencies,” she said, while the official attempted to assure her that the US was a world leader in disaster recovery.

Rushed from civilian life to Florida within days of the Surfside collapse, the team’s arrival on site in their olive-green uniforms — headed by Vach in his kippah — breathed new hope into many family members desperate to see faster progress to free loved ones who may have been alive underneath the rubble.