Present in pictures and reports from the building collapse in the Florida town of Surfside are members of the team of rescue workers dispatched there by the Israel Defense Forces’ Homefront Command. A sense of their significance can be gleaned from the plea, made by a woman whose twenty-six-year-old daughter had been in the apartment building and was still missing, to Governor Ron DeSantis and other officials. Armin Rosen reports:
[I]n her confrontation with DeSantis, the mother articulated a somewhat unexpected criteria for proving that every means of rescue was in fact being exhausted. “I was promised yesterday, and everybody else was promised, that the Israelis would be allowed in and that they are here,” she pleaded. “I have inside information they are not here and they are not working. Governor, it’s in your control, as I understand. You promised us and they’re not here.”
The IDF team has been an object of special fascination. On [June 30], in a tented and muddy press area with a weird resemblance to a county fairground, members of the press swarmed Elad Edri, a close-shaven and unflinchingly calm IDF colonel clutching a yellow hard-hat, angling for quotes even while DeSantis was speaking less than 100 feet away.
That the Israeli visitors have succeeded in alleviating anyone’s suffering shows what the Jewish state can mean to people thousands of miles away during the worst moment of their lives. Just weeks after an eleven-day conflict with Hamas that raised fresh anxieties over a schism between Israel and the Diaspora, the tragedy in Surfside shows that the connections between American Jews and the Jewish state are not merely political and go beyond the strictly rational. The bonds are resilient in ways that perhaps only a crisis can fully bring to the surface. In moments of need, all other contexts retreat into the background, and the Jews can still resemble a family.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/armin-rosen-idf-surfside