Under the stars in the Judean Desert, a group of reservists and volunteers who worked with the dead after October 7 gathered for a two-day workshop at Metzokei Dragot, organized by the Israeli nonprofit Meshiv HaRuach. Their shared task had been the identification, care and burial preparation of victims of the October 7 massacre and later war casualties, work many described as emotionally overwhelming but also deeply meaningful. The article centers on the military morgue and identification system known as Shura, and on the people who spent months there processing the dead.
Participants included Israel Viskot of Dimona, a 47-year-old rabbi and educator who served about 430 reserve days in MANACH, the IDF body-recovery unit. He recalled unloading bags from a truck and seeing one marked with his son’s battalion, 450, before forcing himself to continue working. He later learned his son was safe. Other participants described similar moments, including Lior Oveknin from Ashkelon, who in the first weeks after the massacre moved bodies from the southern border area to Shura, and M., a military rabbinate officer, who texted his family that he was in a room with dozens of corpses.
The workshop asked each person to build a timeline of important emotional moments. Facilitator Dotan Zilber said it was not a competition in suffering, but a search for authentic moments. Participants chose words such as confusion, and Zilber told them, “We are trying to take confusion and turn it into blossoming.” The nonprofit Meshiv HaRuach was founded after October 7 by reserve Col. Il Kravitz and Daniel Hermon, who himself has post-traumatic stress, with help from Yishai Karniel and Kobi Landau. It says more than 3,000 people have taken part in its activities, which are aimed at those who support others, including medical teams, rescue workers, mental-health professionals, rabbis, social workers, and spouses of reservists and trauma survivors.
Several participants also recounted the civilian side of Shura, known as TARCH, which handled the October 7 victims and has since closed. Sigi Duak, a speech therapist who worked there with Health Ministry social workers, described families waiting in anguish, sometimes identifying loved ones visually after forensic checks. She said she left Shura feeling “in love with the people of Israel.” Arieh Minkov, now a reserve officer in the rabbinate, said the work felt endless and that, for the families, every delay was unbearable. The article closes with a line repeated around the campfire: the Nazis turned people into numbers, while Shura’s workers turned numbers back into people.
