IDF officer pulls religious Jewish texts from rubble of Miami condo collapse

An image of an IDF search and rescue officer recovering a cache of religious Jewish texts from the rubble of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida, has been making the rounds on social media.

Two weeks after the collapse of the Champlain Towers South apartment complex, the IDF Homefront Command’s search-and-rescue delegation, led by Col. Golan Vach, continues to work to find and pull bodies from the rubble.

A large number of the missing are from Miami’s Jewish community. A photo shared by Bal Harbour Mayor Gabriel Groisman shows Jewish texts being recovered from the rubble – presenting a small but representative image of the diverse population that once lived in the tower.

The image itself shows an Israeli search and rescue officer passing of a stack of religious Jewish books to a South Florida Urban Search and Rescue worker after pulling it from the carnage of the collapsed building.

“Israeli and South Florida Search and Rescue Teams [are] working together to remove sacred Jewish books from the rubble at the Champlain Towers,” said Groisman. “So much symbolism in this most powerful photograph.”

At the time, Vach and his team were focused on recovering the bodies of a Jewish couple who were buried under the tons of concrete that fell on them, according to the Miami Herald.

Vach began finding personal effects belonging to the couple, “shreds of paper, notes and books,” the report stated. Then at one point, he noticed that a few of the books were from the Talmud. As he handed the texts over to the South Florida search and rescue worker, an observer captured an image of the exchange and shared it on social media – where it was picked up and shared by the mayor.

“It was special in this event to do your holy mission to get these things back to their families,” Vach told the Herald.

“We are doing this with very much dignity, very much respect,” he added. “We are trying to do this mission the best we can.”

Groisman commented further on the find, stating that everyone at one point or another in their lives are “missing the physical items that they’ve lost in addition to the people they’ve lost,” he said, according to the newspaper.

“In the Jewish religion, we keep these books in the house,” he said. “When you fill your house with Jewish texts, your house becomes a home. To see those in the rubble is symbolic of the lives lost.”

United Hatzalah volunteer Raphael Poch is part of a team of search and rescue and psychological trauma experts sent from Israel to assist all the families – not just those who are Jewish – during this difficult time.

Poch told the Herald that the recovery of the Jewish texts is of great importance, noting that they are kept as significant keepsakes, especially after the Holocaust where many books connected to the Jewish religion were burned, never to be seen again.

“These are books Jewish people carried with them for thousands of years,” Poch told the paper.

Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 79 on Friday after workers extracted 14 more bodies from the ruins and said they had reduced the pile of debris down nearly to ground level.

The recovery left 61 people still missing and feared dead in the concrete and steel rubble of the 12-story oceanfront building, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said.