Jewish volunteers on standby to find human remains for burial

An orthodox Jewish volunteer organization is on standby to comb through the wreckage of the Surfside condo building that collapsed Thursday.

Their mission: recover all parts of the body, from blood to human tissue, that must be buried according to Jewish religious law. They’ll start searching once they have permission from rescue and safety crews.

The number of missing condo residents rose to 159 on Friday, with four deaths confirmed so far in the Champlain Towers South disaster.

The estimated number of Jewish people among the missing rose to 35 on Friday, said the rabbi in charge of the organization called Chesed Shel Emes, Hebrew for “kindness from truth.”

The name is derived from the belief that when you “help the deceased you cannot be repaid from it. The deceased can never thank us” and that makes it the ultimate act of kindness, said Rabbi Mark Rosenberg, who runs the group, and is also a chaplain with the Florida Highway Patrol and the Miami-Dade Police Department.

He said his group believes the Jewish requirement that a body be buried intact, “in its entirety, as quick as possible,” he said. He said Jews believe the “soul is in pain until the body is buried.”

His group of 40 members are on standby but not at the site of the collapsed building. “We’re always hoping there will be good news and our services won’t be needed,” he said.

Once called, his group will begin the horrific task of a meticulous search for body parts — a task made more difficult by the crushing weight of the rubble.

If people are crushed, it could be a Holocaust survivor’s tattoo that could be identified, for example, he said. “If there are other ways people can be identified, we do the best we can; in plane crashes, we have the same problem,” he said.

The organization is most famous in Israel, where volunteers there respond to terrorist attacks, moving in after rescue crews to search for tiny pieces of flesh or drops of blood.

In South Florida, the group most recently was called for help to attend to a fiery plane crash at North Perry Airport in March. One of the people on board was Jewish. In 2018, the group also responded to the Parkland high school massacre, where several of the children who were killed were Jewish.