10
W EEK END
Tomer Persico
M
inutes after the explo-
sion, a Zaka team arrives
at the scene of the terror-
ist attack. Immediately
after offering first aid to
the wounded, the personnel of the res-
cue and recovery organization search
for the terrorist’s body, or what’s left
of it. It was difficult to locate the
body in the era of the suicide bomb-
ers, but one part of it stood out, and
it was also in demand: the head. Usu-
ally the terrorist’s head was severed
from his body and flew some distance
from the explosion’s epicenter, and the
members of the Zaka team competed
to find it. The one who did would hold
it up like a trophy, frequently have his
photo taken proudly with the prize, be-
fore passing the head of the decapitat-
ed body on to others for an extensive
round of photo ops.
Gideon Aran, emeritus professor of
sociology and anthropology at the He-
brew University of Jerusalem, accom-
panied Zaka teams in the years during
which the organization evolved from
being a handful of ultra-Orthodox vol-
unteers into a recognized institution and
a regular presence at the scene of every
terrorist attack. His new book, “The
Cult of Dismembered Limbs: Jewish
Rites of Death at the Scene of Palestin-
ian Suicide Terrorism” (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 338 pages), is an illuminating
work of research on the organization’s
underlying social and religious logic.
Among other topics, Aran writes at
length about how the terrorist’s head
becomes a trophy, raised high and show-
cased among the Zaka crew. That, how-
ever, is not always the end of its role. In
some cases the head, or some other limb
identified as belonging to the terrorist, is
swung over the heads of the volunteers
amid murmurs of “This is my substitute,
this is my contribution, this is my atone-
ment” – the same words spoken by Hare-
dim while swinging a live chicken above
the head on the morning of Yom Kippur
eve. What takes place is a ceremony of
kapparot (atonements), which in the
Zaka drama takes the form of transfer-
ring their sins to the human bomb.
This is Aran’s second book about the
phenomenon of suicide bombers; in 2018
he published “The Smile of the Human
Bomb” (Cornell University Press), fo-
cusing on the social, religious, psycho-
logical and physical preparations of the
terrorist up to the seconds before self-
detonation. The new book deals with the
minutes after the explosion, and specifi-
cally with the organization that takes
upon itself what is perceived as a sacred
task: gathering up the bodies, the body
parts and the blood of the Jews who have
been murdered.
Aran has had the rare sociological
good fortune of being present at the de-
velopment of new religious movements
in their formative years. His doctoral
dissertation described, as a product of
close field work, the formation of Gush
Emunim and the settlement movement
in general during their initial years. This
time, Aran was embedded with Zaka
from 2002 to 2006, the peak years of the
second intifada, and the book’s text testi-
fies to the depth of his penetration of the
intra-organizational discourse and the
thinking guiding its members. The re-
sult is a brilliant study that exposes the
reader to a new Jewish-Haredi subgroup
and its beliefs, customs and rites.
* * *
Zaka (Hebrew acronym for “disaster
victim identification”) sprang from an
organization called Hesed Shel Emet
(“true loving-kindness”) which was
itself founded in 1989 in the wake of a
terrorist attack. A terrorist who board-
ed a No. 405 bus, traveling to Jerusalem
from Tel Aviv, grabbed the steering
wheel forcefully and caused the vehicle
to plunge into a deep valley below the
Haredi town of Kiryat Ye’arim (aka
Telz-Stone). Yeshiva students rushed
down the steep hill to assist in rescuing
the injured. There, in the hills outside
Jerusalem, Aran maintains, the con-
nection between ultra-Orthodox Jews
and terrorist attacks had its genesis.
That happened at the moment, even
as the rescue was underway, that the
police declared the event to have been
a terrorist act. In a twinkling the Jews
on the bus were transformed from
victims of an accident into murdered
martyrs. Simultaneously the Haredi
rescuers were inevitably transformed
from good people who had come to as-
sist, into meshamshim bakodesh (those
who serve the sacred). The site of the
event too became imbued with religious
significance, and the alchemy required
to transform yeshiva students into per-
sonnel of the rescue services was played
out.
After the incident, Rabbi Elazar Gelb-
stein gathered together about a hundred
volunteers, many of whom worked in a
hevra kadisha (burial society) group
he managed, and Hesed Shel Emet was
born. The nascent organization suffered
from operational problems and disorder,
and within a few years internal tension
sprang up between Gelbstein and anoth-
er member of the organization, Yehuda
Meshi-Zahav. At the end of 1995, Meshi-
Zahav left Gelbstein’s organization and
founded Zaka.
The timing of its establishment was
significant, because it was then that the
suicide bombing attacks began, in reac-
tion to the massacre of Muslim worship-
pers perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in
the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron,
Zaka’s men at work at Be’eri following last October’s assault on the kibbutz. Hurrying to gather the sparks of holiness from the human wreckage. 
Blood and entrails
and pillars of smoke
Fascinating evidence of the connection that’s been created in Israel between Haredim and disaster
scenes is offered in a new book by an expert on the intersection of religion and violence. The extremist
leaders of the Zaka rescue and recovery organization shatter received conventions one by one
in February 1994. Zaka has been part of
the Israeli public space since then, be-
ginning with the grim years of the sec-
ond intifada, and became an integral ele-
ment in the broadcast landscapes of the
live, open studio on Channel 2, which had
gone on the air around the same time,
in 1993.
It was in the No. 405 bus attack that
Zaka’s special attitude toward blood
was formed. For generations, the blood
of the human body did not much occupy
the arbiters of halakha, Jewish religious
law, other than in matters of menstrua-
tion and its associated proscriptions
for women. Before the 1990s, sites of
Ultimately, the terrorism
scene is, horrendously, also
the zone of sanctification
of the terrorist, the arena
from which he ascends to
heaven in a chariot of fire
and blood. The Zaka people
take pride in their devotion,
but here too they are in a
state of tension with the
terrorist himself.
both car accidents and terrorist attacks
would be hosed down without hesitation.
Aran notes that if today, the collection
of victims’ spilled blood has reached
obsessive levels, it all began with that
1989 bus attack. The transformation of
the Haredim into “servants of the sa-
cred” rendered holy the blood of those
who were murdered, and necessitated a
change of approach. Now, the bodies of
the murdered would be buried in their
blood-drenched clothes, and yeshiva stu-
dents continued to scour the slope of the
hill searching for body fragments long
after the casualties were evacuated.
The founding event on the hill outside
Jerusalem foreshadowed what followed.
According to the accounts cited by Aran,
entering the scene of a terrorist attack
was for the Zakaites tantamount to en-
tering a sacred zone, and they them-
selves entered into a form of trance.
They describe themselves as vessels in
God’s hands, operating efficiently with-
in an extraterritorial region that was
created out of an eruption of violence
and became temporarily a shrine. The
encounter with atrocity is also an en-
counter with purity, which there is still
a chance to rescue from defilement, and
the killing field becomes an altar around
which the workers of loving-kindness
hurry to gather the sparks of holiness
from the human wreckage.
Indeed, the scene of a terrorist attack,
with its blood and its torn flesh, conjures
up thoughts of the Temple far more
than it does a contemporary synagogue.
Blood and entrails and pillars of smoke.
It also exhibits clear-cut sacrifices: The
terrorist renders himself a burnt offer-
ing for the sake of his own struggle, the
victims become sacrifices willy-nilly,
are slain on the altar of the state or of
the Jewish people and are thus elevated
involuntarily to the status of martyrs.
Even the term pigua tofet to describe
a terrorist attack evokes the biblical
tophet, the altar in Jerusalem on which
human child sacrifices were made.
Collecting the body parts is thus con-
sidered a holy task. Aran quotes a Zaka
volunteer as saying that collecting chil-
dren’s limbs is “like the moment on Yom
Kippur when the shofar is sounded with
purity that breaks through to higher
realms.” Equipped with halakhic rul-
ings that allow them to continue in their
labors even past the prescribed daily
prayer times, the Zakaites do not de-
sist from their mission until the scene
has, from their point of view, been “re-
deemed” – meaning that it has been pu-
rified from any remains of the victims.
As soon as the work is done, they hurry
to complete the afternoon prayers, in
the belief that their words will burst
through to the highest firmament and
be heard by their Creator.
* * *
It’s clear that what we are seeing here
is a peak expression of religiosity. The
Zakaites are as priests serving in holi-
ness, which is achieved precisely by
descending into the depths of horror.
This form of grappling, with the fear of
God and the terror of death, requires the
creation of various ceremonial patterns,
fixed ritual norms that define the way
one should comport oneself, thus mak-
ing the task tolerable.
For example, if religious law dic-
tates that visitors to a cemetery must
wash their hands upon leaving, be-
cause we are leaving a place of ritual
Aftermath of a 1994 Tel Aviv bus bombing. Suicide bombings took off after Baruch
Goldstein’s Hebron massacre that year. 
impurity, Zaka personnel wash their
hands when they enter the scene of a
terror attack. They must self-purify,
because they are transiting from a
place of lesser holiness to a site of
greater holiness. Aran relates that
some of them maintain that, ideally,
they should immerse themselves in
the mikveh – ritual purification bath –
before and not following entering the
scene of the terrorist event. There is
also a spiritual hierarchy attached to
the physical site: The epicenter of the
explosion is the holy of holies, and ac-
cordingly only high-ranking Zakaites
are permitted access to it. They are
like the high priests of the Temple,
even though paradoxically, as Aran
observes, kohanim (descendants of
the biblical priestly class) are forbid-
den from being in the presence of
dead bodies.
Zaka works with rabbis who provide
the field personnel with an array of
halakhic rulings for carrying out their
work. For example, Zaka members – who
are exclusively male – are permitted to
look upon and handle the naked body of a
woman. They are also permitted to trav-
el to the scene of an attack on Shabbat
and to perform a host of other tasks that
are forbidden on the day of rest except
in cases of pikuah nefesh (saving a life),
such as soaking up blood in order to bury
it. The terrorism site becomes an extra-
territorial zone of halakha beshinu’i
(performance of a forbidden act in an
different way), but this in order to per-
form precious and holy commandments:
bringing murdered Jews to burial.
Traditional societies always used
outside groups to perform the tasks
that they could not perform because
they were taboo. The “Shabbos goy”
(a non-Jew who will turn lights on and
off on the Sabbath, for example) is an
example, also the Jews in Europe who
loaned money with interest to Chris-
tians who maintained that they were
Jerome Delay/AP
Olivier Fitoussi
forbidden to do so. The Zakaites are
a similar group vis-à-vis Israeli soci-
ety, but they come from within that
society and as such their status is far
more complex and sensitive. They
are simultaneously an inferior caste
of those who do work viewed as con-
temptible and high priests carrying
out acts of holiness.
According to Aran, the Zaka teams
are both pained and experiencing plea-
sure, embarrassed and proud of their
work and of the permissions granted to
them. They enter a site rife with taboo
prohibitions and breach them one by
one. Halakhic rulings that back up their
They are torn between
harrowing horror and
glorious holiness, between
halakhic transgression
and urgent necessity.
That tension, Aran writes,
engenders energy that
is manifested in joy, in
determination and even in
singing, but also in various
macabre rituals.
work allow them to commit transgres-
sions with permission – that is, to remain
formally within the framework of the
tradition – but this diminishes the dis-
tress only slightly. Tradition is limited
to halakhic acts, it is also a way of life,
an entire habitus. For those in Zaka, a
charged atmosphere is created of dar-
ing, subversion, euphoria and pain.
They are torn between harrow-
ing horror and glorious holiness, and
between halakhic transgression and
urgent necessity. That tension, Aran
writes, engenders bursting energy
that is manifested in joy, in determi-
nation and even in singing (of Shabbat
melodies), but also in various macabre
rituals. Things reached a pass by which
some averred that ambulance drivers
on Shabbat should actually be Jews, be-
cause it is a privilege to desecrate the
Sabbath for the sake of saving lives and
respecting the dead. A familiar stance,
deriving from Shabbetai Zvi, the 17th-
century false messiah, is apparent here:
It is precisely from sin – when it is com-
mitted for the sake of a supreme and sa-
cred goal – that the rarest sparks rise up
and are purified.
* * *
In Haredi society, Zaka members’
status is inferior to that of Torah stu-
dents. Those who come to the organi-
zation are yeshiva students for whom
Gemara does not roll lightly off the
tongue and who are looking more for
Friday, March 8, 2024 | Haaretz
physical activity than is provided by
sitting in a study house. On the other
hand, there’s also Haredi admiration
of Zaka’s manly activity – uniforms,
motorcycles – and of the way they rub
elbows with death and danger. And, of
course, Zaka serves as a convenient
alibi for Haredim in the face of the de-
mand to do military service: Hey, they
declare, we’re contributing our share.
Perhaps, in fact, their contribution
is greater than they surmise, and not
necessarily in a positive way. Aran
shows how the strict behavior that
Zaka displayed toward handling bodies
became a norm for the Israel Defense
Forces and for all of Israeli society. In
the first decade of the 2000s, the mili-
tary chaplaincy began to adopt Zaka’s
methods of operation with regard to
collecting minute body remains. This
was manifested when an IDF armored
personnel carrier was blown up in 2004
on the Philadelphi route along Gaza’s
border with Egyptian Sinai. Soldiers
in a platoon commanders course were
rushed to the scene to comb the area
on their hands and knees in search of
any remnants of the fallen. Israel’s en-
emies have also noticed this. In his first
speech directed at the Israeli public af-
ter the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Hez-
bollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – well
aware of the growing sensitivity over
this subject – stated with sadistic pride
that his organization was in possession
of body parts of Israeli soldiers.
This is perhaps a necessary result of
the essence of Zaka’s activity. The or-
ganization doesn’t only deal with sites
of terrorist attacks, it sanctifies them.
Sanctity is an attractive attribute, cer-
tainly for substantial sections of Israeli
society. Waves of sanctity emanate
from Zaka’s activity and are reshap-
ing the attitude of Israel’s Jewish popu-
lation to the deaths of their sons and
daughters. The organization’s priestly
caste members are becoming guides in
a reality in which hellish attacks are
routine. A Haredi subculture with its
own singular customs is setting the Is-
raeli standard for dealing with bodies.
However, sanctification isn’t attrac-
tive only to Israelis. Ultimately, the ter-
rorism scene is, horrendously, also the
zone of sanctification of the terrorist,
the arena from which he ascends to
heaven in a chariot of fire and blood.
The Zaka people take pride in their de-
votion, but here too they are in a state
of tension with the terrorist himself,
who in the most literal sense gives his
life. They do holy work, but the terror-
ist also considers himself a shahid,
namely a holy person who testifies to
his faith and is ready to sacrifice what
is most precious for its sake.
Aran tracks this horrific tension
and quotes Zakaites who cannot but
admire the terrorist’s religious com-
mitment. They cannot but admit that
the scene of the attack, which is like a
shrine for them, was even before that
a site of sacrifice, of a burnt offering,
by the terrorist for his God. A horrific,
barbaric shrine of murder becomes a
pure and macabre shrine of gathering
the remains of the victims, while the
shahid himself is collected, as noted
above, as prey and his body parts used
for atonement. Indeed, the transfer of
the terrorist’s transgressions would not
be possible if he did not possess at least
a bit of “purity” for taking the sin on
himself.
The history of religions shows us
that blood, including human blood that
is deliberately shed, has been used for
sacred purposes in many traditions.
The proximity to death, and even the
atrocity, is not contrary to sanctity, but
is often a condition for its existence. In
fact, it is one of the earliest and most
routine patterns of the religious phe-
nomenon. Numberless gods asked for
sacrifices, demanded the blood of the
sheep and the cattle of their believ-
ers, and also the blood of the believers
themselves.
The events of October 7 confronted
Zaka with the largest logistical and
psychological test in its history. As
Aaron Rabinovitz showed in Haaretz
earlier this year , Zaka did not always
meet the test: Its personnel were oc-
cupied with PR and fundraising no less
than with evacuating the murdered. It’s
apparent that the life of the moment
sometimes overcomes eternal life.
The organization is still recovering
as well from the death of its founder,
Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, in 2022. The re-
ports that he had attacked and sexu-
ally harassed a large number of men,
women and children drove him to take
his life. Aran writes that Meshi-Zahav
was considered a “wild man” in Zaka,
an image he liked to cultivate, but in
Aran’s assessment, there were no clear
indications attesting to his crimes as
they were happening. At most it can
be said, Aran writes, that the man was
devoured by the monster he created:
breaking taboos engenders breaking
taboos.
Zaka will continue to accompany
the State of Israel as an arm of the
Haredi autonomous regime, which is
concurrently penetrating and being
enveloped by Israeliness. As an appro-
priate Haredi response to the horrific
crimes of the terrorists, Zaka is doing
fascinating theological work. Without
a political response that will separate
the peoples living here, the Jewish
tradition can be expected to develop
many additional forms and types of
blood and death rituals.
Dr. Tomer Persico is a research fellow at the
Shalom Hartman Institute and a Rubinstein
Fellow at Reichman University.