Haim Outmezgine, commander of ZAKA’s special units, suggests that we conduct this interview in the evening, just before he goes to sleep. “After every conversation like that, or after the tours I give in the south, I am overcome by an incredible tiredness – and then I can’t keep my eyes open during the day,” he explains. “It’s a response to the emotional burden that sweeps over me. The body responds to protect me. Since October 7, two [ZAKA] volunteers have had a stroke, and two others have died from heart attacks. We can’t link it directly to October 7, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it happened a month after the massacre to young, healthy people.”

Was it especially difficult as the anniversary approached?

“We were all feeling anxious during the Sukkot holiday, so somebody suggested that we all meet up at the site of the Nova music festival. Within three hours, 150 volunteers drove there, wandered around, sang songs and embraced each other. Forgetting is part of the professional skills in our line of work; it helps to move on to the next incidents. When we are required to remember – that’s when it’s hard.”

Thirteen months after the massacre of October 7, ZAKA volunteers are still picking up the pieces. Even those accustomed to the harsh sights of mass-casualty disaster scenes couldn’t withstand the scale and brutality of the massacre sites in the border communities and at the Nova festival—especially when, in the early days, bodies were evacuated under heavy Hamas fire.

. In addition, the soldiers serving at Shura Camp, who dealt with identifying bodies and preparing them for burial, suffer from many of the symptoms described later, including sleep difficulties, apathy toward work and home, loss of taste and smell, outbursts of anger, heightened alertness, and risk-taking. This affects not only the quality of life of those exposed to horrors, but also their interactions with the immediate family.

"We published an address where women could report that their husband needed help," says Otmazgin, "without it being known that it came from them. That way, we reached volunteers who were ashamed or didn’t recognize the need, while for the wives and children, it was clear that he was no longer the same husband and father they knew before the war."

How did you realize that you yourself needed therapy?

"In the first few weeks, people kept urging me to see a psychologist, and I said it wasn’t necessary, that I was strong and handling it well. When I noticed that other people responded  exactly the same way when I told them to go to therapy, I realized that I was not seeing myself properly. I made an appointment with a psychologist, I took a photo of myself next to the sign outside his house and I posted it on social media – to give a personal example, as a commander who is considered strong and who has a lot of experience on the ground. Another way to encourage people to go to therapy was to bring in undercover professionals to mingle with the volunteers during bonding events. The commanders instructed them to walk alongside someone with a hand on their shoulder or to talk to someone else's wife, because we recognized that they needed a connection with a support professional”.

 Why did they need to be undercover?

“At first, everyone wanted to look like a hero. They were worried that if anyone identified any weakness in them, they would be kept off shifts. They didn’t understand that, in order to ensure that they did not go into the next incident from a place of being totally broken, they would have to open up. Now, there isn’t a single volunteer from October 7 who has not had therapy in some framework, which has taught them to spot the warning signs. For example, starting things and not finishing them or not showering for several days.”

What have you come to understand thanks to your meeting with the psychologist?

“First of all, I am still in contact with him over the phone. When he asked me what has changed in me since the war started, I told him that I have started asking people for a cigarette, even though I gave up smoking four years ago. He asked whether I touched burnt bodies. I told him that I handled a lot of them, and he explained that my brain is trying to restore my faith in smoke and to connect it to experiences that bring back good memories. He told me not to resist if it helps.”

And does it?

“Yes. He also identified the impact on my household, which was not as positive as I thought. When my child cried because one of his toys was broken, I told him, ‘Just be glad you have a toy that could get broken – and calm down right now.’ I thought that it was positive that I was bringing a different perspective on life, on what it’s okay to cry over or be angry at – if at all. And my psychologist asked why my son has to live the life of a ZAKA volunteer. He’s only seven years old. As far as he is concerned, his pain is justified, so let him be a child. I realized that I was denying him the empathy that he needs from me as a father, just because there are children who were killed, and they don’t have any toys. After that, we recorded a song that I wrote after my children called me while I was in the Gaza-border communities, and I couldn’t answer.” (See video)

Did your children understand that you had gone through an abnormal experience?

“One volunteer who came back from the south saw his mother-in-law playing the alphabet game with his daughter. When it came to an object starting with B, she shouted out ‘Body!’ He was shocked because he hadn’t talked at home about what he’d seen, but she picked it up from people around her. We realized that we needed to explain to her what her father does so that her imagination would not run wild. There were also some older children who were exposed to photographs from the scene that their fathers took on their cell phones. They also needed emotional support. The volunteers were not the only ones affected; the people closest to them also suffered.”

“At first, everyone wanted to look like a hero. They were worried that if anyone identified any weakness in them, they would be kept off shifts. They didn’t understand that, in order to ensure that they did not go into the next incident from a place of being totally broken, they would have to open up."

The erosion of emotional resources and defenses

“The ripples of trauma spread far and wide,” confirms Vered Atzmon Meshulam, a medical psychologist specializing in trauma, loss and grief, who started working for ZAKA some three months ago, where she now heads the organization’s Resilience Division, which offers therapy and group workshops to the organization’s volunteers. The idea was born from an appeal issued to therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists by the National Insurance Institute at the start of the war in order to provide treatment for groups of people who were directly or indirectly traumatized by the events. Some 1.7 million shekels ($450,000) have been allocated to the organization which oversees ZAKA on a national level, of which around a third has already been used, while the Tel Aviv branch has received 563,000 shekels, of which 422,000 shekels has been used.

“ZAKA volunteers were exposed to the kind of trauma that they never experienced in the past and for a longer period of time, because the war still hasn’t ended,” says Atzmon Meshulam. “In the beginning, the sense of being on a missile and the adrenaline gave them the strength to carry on, but the fact that the war is still happening and the prolonged anxiety that they are experiencing lead to an erosion of their emotional resources and defenses. We hold workshops twice a week to help them process and to ensure that the trauma does not become permanent. I am not currently offering any content that might lead to a breakdown because I need to make sure their defenses are strong enough for the next incident. When the warwas ends, we will change our system.”

Is group therapy a significant factor here?

“The groups have a big impact on resilience. They understand each other, they went through similar experiences and share the same instinct to show up at terrible incidents. My connection with them also succeeded, in part, because we met when I accompanied, on behalf of the Ministry of Health, the families of civilians who were murdered as they came to identify the bodies of their loved ones at the Shura army camp. I know exactly what sights they are talking about and understand their insistence not to miss a single shift – because I also refused to give up, even though my mother tells me, ‘I don’t understand how you do it. What kind of person insists on doing something like that?’ My role is to look into the face of the body so that I can prepare the families for what they will see – and then give them support, with another therapist – physically, too – when they identify their loved ones. That is the most heart-rending moment.”

How did you manage to do that?

“A friend of mine, who was a paramedic on the scene of the Dizengoff Street suicide bombing terror event in 1994, advised me'Shut down as many of your senses as you can, so they absorb as little as possible.' And I must have shut down, because in those first days, I looked on as if I didn’t understand what I was seeing—and I’m someone who usually processes things quickly. You create a sense of detachment to protect yourself. That understanding and these tools helped me draw up a working plan for ZAKA. And I am aware that most people will not come for one-on-one therapy, because they don’t have time, or they come but don’t stick with it. The more acute cases do go to therapy once or twice a week. I won't give up on them. ZAKA’s openness is very surprising and very moving. Other groups of people, who are a lot less conservative, have not undergone a process like this.”

Atzmon Meshulam says that she is about to launch a series of group therapy sessions for the partners of ZAKA volunteers. The wives are often the first to notice that something is wrong with their husbands; sometimes, it is their silence which is most worrying. One of them, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that her husband “does not talk about what he experienced in the south and isn’t willing to talk about it in therapy because that would be disrespectful of the dead. He says that their honor will stay with him and go with him – and that it isn’t for anybody else to hear. I hope that, when the war ends, we can get him into some significant therapy and rehabilitate the family. Now, in the middle of it all, isn’t the right time.”

Maybe it’s better not to wait?

“There are good days and bad days. The one thing that is certain is that he has gone from being someone who was very involved into someone who is simply not there. Our son got married this year and my husband was like a guest at the wedding; he was not part of the preparations and did not know what was going on. His sense of proportion in life has changed. If one of our children falls and is crying, he laughs or ignores him. Everything pales into comparison with the horrors he saw.”

"We hold workshops twice a week to help them process and to ensure that the trauma does not become permanent. I am not currently offering any content that might lead to a breakdown because I need to make sure their defenses are strong enough for the next incident. When the warwas ends, we will change our system.”

‘It took me six months before I could look at meat’

Out of approximately 700 ZAKA volunteers who were present at the massacre scenes, 140 have already participated in workshops offered by the 'Mashiv HaRuach' initiative, designed for rescue forces who operated on October 7th. Atzmon Meshulam, one of the founders of the initiative, explains that following the workshops, ZAKA decided to establish an internal resilience program. ”Some participants are currently dealing with issues that they have had for years,” Atzmon Meshulam says. “What they witnessed on October 7 brought back memories from previous traumatic events and created an opportunity to address them. The sessions are divided into two hours of experiential physical activity, such a dog-assisted therapy or therapeutic horse-riding, and two hours of processing – combined with tools taken from their world, such as singing niggunim round a campfire or Jewish meditation techniques.”

“Thanks to the therapy, my situation has improved,” says Yossi Landau, the head of operations for Zaka’s Lakhish region. “But it will take time until it’s behind me. This morning, I didn’t want to get out of bed at all. I had flashbacks and my whole day was crazy. In previous incidents, we knew that it would be over within a couple of hours, and we would move on withour lives. Here, there were many months of work – collecting the bodies and then cleaning the blood off vehicles and sweeping up the ashes. Moreover, in the past year we have dealt with three times the number of deaths by suicide compared to previous years; soldiers, soldiers’ families and survivors of the massacre. Every such incident sets us back a lot of steps. No one among our ranks has died by suicide, thank God; we caught it in time. ZAKA invests a lot of money in this therapy. I don’t know if you would have even been able to talk to me if it were not for their embrace, because I probably would have gone insane.”

How was it for you in the beginning of it all?

“For the first three months, I couldn’t look my children and grandchildren in the eye; I couldn’t touch them after what I saw the terrorists did to children the same age. I couldn’t even participate properly in my son’s bar mitzvah. I could still see everything in front of my eyes.”

It’s hard to function like that.

“I got a lot of phone calls from the wives and children of ZAKA volunteers, all of them asking the same thing: Give us back the father we had. Employers also complained to me, saying that they ‘talk to the volunteer for half an hour and it’s like talking to the wall. He’s not present.’ One volunteer was even fired, which led to the whole fabric of his family life changing. I once got a call at midnight from a boy who was 10 days away from celebrating his bar mitzvah. He told me that nothing was ready because his father was oblivious to everything going on around him. He stayed in bed, went for a walk, came back and acted like a ghost.”

Professionals say that activities with some significance can aid recovery and avoid PTSD.

“That’s true, but I still dream about it all at night. It took me six months before I could even look at meat. I don’t mean to eat meat; I couldn’t even look at it. For eight months, all I could smell was the stench of decay. You could take me to the most fragrant bakery, and I wouldn’t feel a thing. I felt like a snake; everything I ate tasted like ashes.”

Are you in contact with the families of any of the victims?

“That is part of the problem, when they find out who handled their loved one and ask him for details about exactly what happened. And then we have a problem. Many times, we have to refrain from telling the whole truth, because we want to honor the dead. We want their loved ones to remember them as they were when they were alive. But sometimes they have already seen a short video and they accuse you of lying.”

And you don’t want to tell them that the body was mutilated.

“Right. Once, I was invited by one family member who had seen a video and wanted to know more. When they realized I was lying, they started to attack and hit me. The next day, I drove down to the Dead Sea to tell them that I understand, that I have no anger at all, and they could hit me again.”

“It will take time until it’s behind me. In previous incidents, we knew that it would be over within a couple of hours, and we would move on withour lives. Here, there were many months of work – collecting the bodies and then cleaning the blood off vehicles and sweeping up the ashes."

‘Everything I ate tasted like nothing’

Oz Avizov, the head of ZAKA’s diving team, was asked to head up the team coordinating donations from across the country and the world. “At first, people said, ‘Leave me alone, I’m not coming.’ So, I almost dragged top officials from ZAKA, including the CEO, to the first workshops. Once they came, others did, too. Now, every such workshop has 10 men attending who deal with death from morning to night. People who have not sat still in a chair for a whole day since they were eight years old are now sitting quietly for the whole workshop – and they even complain when it ends.”

Are psychologists able to deal with the descriptions and details that come up during therapy?

“There were some who, after a couple of sessions, broke down and didn’t come back. Vered (Atzmon Meshulam) is a hero. She had helped to organize two-day workshops in the desert and at the beach. After diving, people started to loosen up and talk. There are certainly instances of outbreaks of rage. Everyone’s fuse is shorter. We work on it with ice pools and breathing exercises. Most of the volunteers don’t tell their wives what horrors they have seen, because only a very few of them could handle it.”

Esti Avizov, Oz’s wife, says that it was the silence that was most concerning. “At the start of the war, he would just be silent. He didn’t tell us anything. He would come home exhausted and sleep on the floor in the living room. No mattress, just a pillow and a blanket. He said it felt better, and I didn’t nag him because I felt I ought to let go – but the children felt it,” she says with a broken voice. “They said that he was mourning and that’s why he slept on the floor. Even when he started sleeping in the bed again, he never slept the whole night. If he fell asleep before me, as soon as I entered the room he would jump up startled. Nothing like that happened before the war.”

As ultra-Orthodox Jews, did you not prefer to talk to a rabbi?

“Our faith gives up the initial resilience,” Oz Avizov replies. “But there is every justification to use professionals: ‘Worry will drive a man insane,’ ‘Take care of your soul’ and ‘Physicians have permission to heal.’ People who suffer from insomnia take pills; I listen to some guided imagery that my psychologist recorded for me to help me fall asleep.”

Is it possible that some volunteers don’t tell their families because they are worried they will pressure them to stop?

“No one can tell the hard core of ZAKA volunteers – 400 people who spend their days and nights doing this job – to stop. They are addicted. I do, however, get messages from volunteers, asking if I’ve seen how ‘this one or that one is behaving. I think he needs therapy.’ We see each other. When I saw volunteers in the south who were struggling, I said, ‘Bro, take a cigarette break and then come back. Or go rest for a few days.’ One of them keeps thanking me to this day for seeing how he was struggling and sending him to do errands.”

Have you had the chance to go back there since then?

“During the intermediary days of the Sukkot festival, a few of us went down to Re’im. We were stunned at how they turned the scene of the party into a tourist site. They planted anemones, set up restrooms, and paved a road. Then, two of my volunteers, strong people, suddenly said, 'I can still smell the bodies here.' 

Smell is a very strong trigger for the volunteers.

“People were grilling meat as a thank you for us and the soldiers, but the volunteers couldn’t stand the smell, which brought up so many memories. In my case, I lost my sense of taste and smell during the first month. Everything I ate tasted like nothing. A psychiatrist told me that it’s normal and temporary, that my mind is creating barriers to protect itself – and eventually those senses have returned. I didn’t want my family to be exposed to those smells, so I changed clothes in my car on the way home every day. After I drove forensic findings to the police and the archeologists, I had to keep the car windows open for two days in order to air it out. My wife refused to travel in the car because of the smell.”

Is it better now?

“Yes. We bought a new car. It’s funny to say, but at a certain stage you get used to the smell. Some volunteers told me that for them, it’s become a sweet smell.”

“During the intermediary days of the Sukkot festival, a few of us went down to Re’im. We were stunned at how they turned the scene of the party into a tourist site. They planted anemones, set up restrooms, and paved a road. Then, two of my volunteers, strong people, suddenly said, 'I can still smell the bodies here.'"

‘They are not part of the Haredi mainstream’

It is no coincidence that Avizov mentions how anxious the volunteers are during normal times. Dina Dror, a social worker and psychotherapist from the Elah Center for Coping with Loss is one of the therapists who have worked over the past year with ZAKA volunteers, as well as with members of the health service who worked at the Shura campand who sought psychological help.

Dror describes what was constantly present there. “A lot of the ZAKA volunteers are generally nervous, and the organization provides them with a framework in which they can make a contribution and can find the action that they cannot find in their insular community. The Haredi society of Torah study is too passive for them, and this is a way for them to burn off energy in a positive way. Their self-image fluctuates between heroic and outsiders. They are not part of the Haredi mainstream. They ride motorcycles, enjoy feeling strong and so expending energy in physical ways helps them deal with the trauma, because they have been extremely tense since October 7.”

How does this tension manifest itself?

“During the first few days after October 7, they evacuated bodies under fire, without protecting themselves. Now, even a car backfiring can set off the survival instinct in them. For some of them, this interferes with their ability to function, and they avoid crowds and noise. For many, it’s hard to be in a store that sells meat. The smell sparks flashbacks and trauma. There are some people who served at the Shura camp who can’t bear to eat chocolate now, because one of the trucks that brought bodies to the facility had an advertisement for chocolate on the side.”

Is this how it’s been for a whole year?

“At first, there were more physical symptoms, like shaking and grinding teeth. These are things that pass during treatment. Now we’re dealing with long-term posttraumatic stress. They’re dealing with the sense that they are different people now, but people cannot see it and they cannot explain it. Some of them wake up from nightmares drenched in sweat. They feel that only other ZAKA volunteers can understand what they are going through. There is a lot of gallows humor, which helps them to deal with everything. There, they can be themselves. There, people understand how much death is present in their lives.”

Does therapy help to contain all that grief?

“Therapy is a space to let go of the horrors that no one wants to hear about, because it’s too hard. One of my patients told me, ‘We handled weeping bodies.’ He could feel what these people went through before they were killed. As a therapist, I try to provide them with a space to share and to rebuild their faith in the world.”

Have you encountered any suicide attempts?

“I witnessed escapism, crazy driving. For some people, the best way to deal with death-related anxiety is to play with death, to dare to be hurt and to fall. It’s not surprising that it happens when you encounter so much violent death. Therapy gives people the hope that they can survive all that.”

Among the therapeutic tools used is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which uses eye movements to help people turn trauma and other distressing experiences into processed memories. “It works like a charm,” says one reservist who served at the Shura campand who handled the bodies of Hamas victims. “The image, which seemed very real, becomes fuzzier. The problem is that we have countless images in our heads.”

The Victim Identification Unit at the Shura camp is affiliated to the Military Rabbinate and employs reservists, most of them relatively old religious men with families – because they have the maturity needed for the role. The public became aware of them when the bodies of residents of the Gaza-border communities and people attending the Nova music festival were taken there to be identified. Some of them are still there by virtue of emergency call-up orders, where they continue to identify fallen soldiers and prepare them for burial. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit did not allow them or their commanding officers to speak to Shomrim, but some of them nonetheless decided to share what they have experienced since the October 7 massacre.

“When I went home for the first time, I called the Ministry of Defence,” one reservist says. “I told them I needed help. The woman on the other end of the line said, ‘I can only offer you PTSD treatment – but only if you prove that you’ve been traumatized.’  I told her that she doesn’t understand and that I am currently traumatized. I very quickly realized that the state cannot treat us individually. We have an excellent mental-health officer who holds group sessions, but that is no substitute for one-on-one therapy.”

So, what did you do?

“I started private therapy, and I can see a clear difference between myself and my colleagues who aren’t getting therapy. They talk about outbursts of rage and grief at home. For me, too, the pain is still very present. You can’t go through what we experienced without some kind of symptoms. If they don’t appear now, they will appear in a few years. We handled the kind of violent deaths that the soul cannot comprehend; it’s a ticking time bomb.”

How does it manifest itself in you?

“During the first few weeks, I hardly ate anything, and then I came home and fired up the barbeque. I’m sure that subconsciously it was an attempt to create a deliberate counterpoint to the smell of burnt bodies. The next few weeks, when they stopped bringing the bodies of civilians and we started handling more fallen soldiers, I was terrified that I would open up a body bag and discover a close friend.”

And did you?

“Passing acquaintances – but that was hard enough. Today, the shifts are less intensive, and I have managed to get some work done in the meantime. Sometimes, in the middle of a work meeting about a timetable or some other nonsense, I scream inwardly: "Two hours ago, I was taking body parts out of a body bag and now you’re arguing with me about things like that?”

Are you angry that you were assigned to that role?

“Angry? As far as I am concerned, I won the lottery. Moreover, I – along with everybody in my unit – fight to handle the bodies that arrive. We even badger the commander to let us work. And if there are plans to cut back on manpower, everyone uses whatever connection they have to make sure they are not cut. There were some people who asked to be furloughed after two or three weeks, because it was too much for them, but most of us are highly motivated.”

Where does that motivation come from? Is it the desire to give them a fitting funeral?

“You feel like you were part of their fight, and, for me, that is something holy. It is the best thing that I can do with my life now, if I cannot fight.”

Does it bring everything flooding back when the victims whose bodies you handled are talked about in the news?

“I went to the shiva of a few of the victims that I felt connected to, having prepared their bodies for burial. I did not introduce myself to the family, because I am not the story, and I did not want to be a burden. There are so many people at shivas like that and no one asks who you are.”

That allows you a brief glimpse into the life of the person whose body you handled.

“Absolutely. I even went to visit the grave of one of them; I just felt the need. There are a lot of surreal connections. After a tough shift, as I was leaving the camp, I was stopped by a female soldier, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen – because I saw life. And then I saw the nail varnish on her fingers and my blood ran cold, because  it immediately brought back memories of the female soldiers I prepared for burial. We carry so much pain with us.”