They Thought They Knew Death, but That Didn’t Prepare Them for Oct. 7

At 76, David Weissenstern has collected the remains of the dead for most of his adult life. But after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people along Israel’s border with Gaza, he can no longer stand the smell of grilled meat. The odor, he says, reminds him too much of burned human flesh.

His son Duby Weissenstern, 48, has lost track of time after working successive days and nights to recover those killed on Oct. 7. He now marks time in relation to that date.

And his son-in-law Israel Ganot, 32, now gags at the smell of food that has turned rotten. He was in the second wave of recovery workers who reached bodies that had been trapped under 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. Its black-and-yellow vests have become synonymous with bus bombings and shootings in Israel, and its members are often first and last on the scene, rushing to collect every drop of blood and bone fragment for burial, sometimes even before the police arrive.

Made up of more than 3,000 volunteers, most of them ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, the group says it is driven by a holy mission to give families closure after the violent death 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 cope with the trauma of Oct. 7. And they are frequently called upon to recount what they saw by Israeli government officials and journalists, which can re-traumatize them, psychologists say.

Critics have challenged the group’s practices, saying volunteers destroyed evidence of war crimes during the Hamas attack in their haste to recover and bury bodies. Some activists, seeking to deny that militants raped and mutilated victims on Oct. 7, have said ZAKA volunteers’ testimony is unreliable because the men are not medical experts or police officers trained in investigating sex crimes.

Some ZAKA members have given misleading accounts to the news media, and some impostors posing as volunteers have given false information in the group’s name.

In the worst-hit areas of the south, some volunteers are still working to recover bodies by sifting through mounds of ash, looking for bone fragments in cars and homes charred by rocket-propelled grenades. Jewish law dictates that bodies should be buried as complete as possible, making every shard of bone 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 impacted,” said Rony Berger, a psychology professor at Tel Aviv University, who has studied and worked with ZAKA volunteers for years.

“They are very adept at handling stress, but it takes a toll,” Mr. Berger said. “From confusion to disassociation, it is hard to get rid of pictures in your head once they are there.”

Often, Mr. Berger said, it is the smells — like burned or rotted flesh — that stay with the volunteers the longest, creating triggers that can later take them back to the scenes of death.

Last month, Yossi Landau, 55, escorted a reporter through the shell of a two-story home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Fewer than five miles from the border with Gaza, the community was one of the hardest hit on Oct. 7. Bullet fragments were still embedded in the living room wall, next to a leather sofa and children’s toys. As he entered the remnants of a bedroom, he noted the sticky-sweet smell that hung in the air.

“It’s the smell of death — once you smell it once, you remember it your whole life,” said Mr. Landau, who is the head of ZAKA’s division in the south.

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

As Mr. Landau walks through the kibbutz, he stops frequently to speak with journalists, giving interviews to television networks from Japan, Germany and Italy. Like many other ZAKA volunteers, he has become an unofficial guide to the horrors that unfolded on Oct. 7, though he admits he is tired and worries about getting the details right.

He feels angry when he reads accounts online that deny the events of Oct 7. Hamas gunmen, he points out, released their own footage of the attacks. Israeli forensic authorities have published a list, including social security numbers, of those killed.

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

Asked about reports, attributed to him, that children had been beheaded on Oct. 7, Mr. Landau denied making the claim, though he acknowledged sometimes misspeaking in the immediate aftermath of the attack. What he saw himself, he said, was a small, burned body with at least part of the head missing, perhaps severed by the force of a blast. It was unclear, he added, if it was the body of teenager or someone younger.

He points out that dozens of children were killed on Oct. 7.

Mr. Landau is familiar with the criticism that ZAKA did not properly document the bodies of women for evidence of sexual assault. Women were found with their pants and underwear pulled down, he said, as well as with knives in their genitals. But ZAKA, he said, is trained in collecting human remains, not in forensic pathology or in using rape kits.

“We make sure we recover the body, as much of the body as we possibly can, for burial. That is our role,” Mr. Landau said. “We were also being shot at while we were trying to reach bodies. We were working as quickly as we could and we did not stop to take photographs.”

In interviews, four other ZAKA volunteers also said that they had come under fire while trying to recover bodies in the week after Oct. 7. The group rushed to recover the bodies both because there were worries that Hamas would ferry the dead to Gaza as bargaining chips for prisoner exchanges, and because Jewish law dictates that the dead should be buried as quickly as possible.

Duby Weissenstern, who reached the area just hours after Hamas had launched its attack, said he was told to turn back by security forces in the area.

“They told me that Hamas was still here, and they were still killing people, but I saw dead bodies in the street, and I knew what I needed to do,” said Mr. Weissenstern, the chief executive of ZAKA.

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

“At first, we stopped and ducked for 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 getting ready to move in.”

As he worked, he texted his father, brother-in-law and other family members who work with ZAKA.

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

His father copes through prayer. An ultra-Orthodox Jew who lives in Jerusalem, David Weissenstern 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 spoke about what he witnessed only to his wife, who has become an impromptu therapist.

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

When they are away from their families, the Weissenstern brothers share stories of what they saw with each other. But when members of the family at the gathering asked how they were doing, they simply nodded and stayed silent.