They thought they knew death, but that didn't prepare them for October 7

At 76, David Weissenstern has spent most of his adult life collecting the remains of the dead. But after the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led fighters along Israel's Gaza border killed about 1,200 people, he can no longer tolerate the smell of grilled meat. The smell, he says, reminds him too much of burnt human flesh.

His son Duby Weissenstern, 48, has lost track of time after working for days and nights on end to retrieve the October 7 victims. He now notes the time in relation to that date.

And his son-in-law Israel Ganot, 32, now gags at the smell of rotten food. He was among the second wave of recovery workers who reached bodies that had been trapped under the rubble for weeks.

All three men are part of ZAKA, an Israeli nonprofit founded in 1995, whose name is the Hebrew acronym for Disaster Victim Identification. The black and yellow vests have become synonymous with bus bombings and shootings in Israel, and its members are often the first and last on the scene, rushing to collect every drop of blood and bone fragment to bury, sometimes even before the police arrive.

The group is made up of more than 3,000 volunteers, most of them ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, and says it is driven by a sacred mission to bring closure to families after the violent deaths of loved ones.

But there is little closure for the volunteers.

The work, they say, can be psychologically taxing, with many not even beginning to process the trauma of October 7. And Israeli government officials and journalists are often called upon to report what they saw, which can retraumatize them. , say psychologists.

Critics have done that challenged the group's practices, saying volunteers destroyed evidence of war crimes during the Hamas attack in their haste to recover and bury the bodies. Some activists, who try to deny that militants raped and mutilated victims on October 7, say the testimonies of ZAKA volunteers are unreliable because the men are not medical experts or police officers trained in investigating sex crimes.

Some ZAKA members have made misleading statements to the news media, and some impostors posing as volunteers have provided false information on behalf of the group.

In the worst-hit areas in the south, some volunteers are still recovering bodies by sifting through piles of ash, looking for bone fragments in cars and houses charred by rocket-propelled grenades. Jewish law dictates that bodies must be buried as complete as possible, making every bone shard precious to ZAKA.

“They see so many bodies and work so directly with human bodies that have been torn apart that they are all psychologically affected,” says Rony Berger, a professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University who has studied and worked with ZAKA volunteers for years. .

“They are very adept at dealing with stress, but it takes its toll,” Mr Berger said. “From confusion to disassociation, it's hard to get rid of images in your head once they're there.”

Often, Mr. Berger said, it is the smells — such as burnt or rotten meat — that stick with volunteers the longest, creating triggers that can later bring them back to the scene of death.

Last month, Yossi Landau, 55, guided a reporter through the shell of a two-story house in Kibbutz Be'eri. Less than eight kilometers from the Gaza border, the community was one of the hardest hit on October 7. Bullet fragments were still lodged in the living room wall, next to a leather couch and children's toys. As he entered the remains of a bedroom, he noticed the sticky, sweet smell in the air.

“It's the smell of death – once you smell it, you remember it for the rest of your life,” said Mr Landau, head of ZAKA's southern branch.

Here, he said, an elderly couple had been killed in an explosion. He rubbed an invisible spot on the wall where he had carefully sponged off blood and tissue weeks earlier.

As Mr. Landau walks around the kibbutz, he stops frequently to talk to journalists and give interviews to television networks from Japan, Germany and Italy. Like many ZAKA volunteers, he has become an unofficial guide to the horrors that unfolded on October 7, although he admits he is tired and worried about getting the details right.

He feels angry when he reads stories online that deny the events of October 7. Hamas gunmen, he points out, have released their own footage of the attacks. The Israeli forensic authorities did that published a listincluding social security numbers, of the dead.

Still, Mr. Landau acknowledges that in the nearly three months since the terrorist attack, some stories have been exaggerated and misinformation has been spread. At least one person has been caught impersonating a ZAKA paramedic and giving interviews to foreign news media, Mr. Landau said.

When asked about reports attributed to him that children had been beheaded on October 7, Mr Landau denied making the claim, although he admitted that there had been occasional misstatements in the immediate aftermath of the attack. What he saw for himself, he said, was a small, burned body with at least part of the head missing, perhaps separated by the force of an explosion. It was unclear, he added, whether it was the body of a teenager or someone younger.

He points out that dozens of children were murdered on October 7.

Mr. Landau is familiar with criticism that ZAKA has not properly documented women's bodies in search of evidence of sexual abuse. Women were found with their pants and underwear pulled down, he said, and with knives in their genitals. But ZAKA, he said, is trained in collecting human remains, not in forensic pathology or in the use of rape kits.

“We are making sure that we recover the body, as much of the body as possible, for burial. That is our role,” Mr Landau said. “We were also shot at when we tried to get to the bodies. We worked as fast as we could and didn't stop to take pictures.”

In interviews, four other ZAKA volunteers also said they had come under fire while trying to recover bodies in the week after October 7. The group rushed to recover the bodies, both because of concerns that Hamas would transfer the dead to Gaza as a bargaining chip. chips for prisoner exchanges, and because Jewish law requires that the dead be buried as quickly as possible.

Duby Weissenstern, who reached the area just hours after Hamas launched the attack, said security forces in the area had ordered him to return.

“They told me that Hamas was still there and they were still killing people, but I saw dead bodies on the streets and I knew what to do,” said Mr. Weissenstern, ZAKA's CEO.

He and three other men worked as quickly as possible to lift the bodies onto the specialized trucks used by ZAKA. They regularly came under fire, he said, from rockets and mortars launched from Gaza.

“At first we stopped and took cover every time there was a boom,” he said. “But then we stopped because it would take too long. We had to work quickly, before nightfall, because the Israeli army was preparing to move in.”

While he was at work, he texted his father, brother-in-law and other family members who work at ZAKA.

In their family, each member had found a unique way to cope with the trauma. He said he would speak to a therapist – once he has had some time to himself.

His father saves himself through prayer. David Weissenstern, an ultra-Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem, prays at the Western Wall as often as he can, he says, often sobbing into his prayer shawl as he processes what he saw.

Menachem Weissenstern, another son who volunteers at ZAKA, said he only talked about what he saw with his wife, who has become a makeshift therapist.

In early December, dozens of members of the Weissenstern family gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah. For Duby Weissenstern, the date was “nine weeks since October 7.”

When they are away from their families, the Weissenstern brothers share stories about what they have seen. But when members of the family at the gathering asked how they were doing, they simply nodded and remained silent.