SURFSIDE, Fla. — As the sun sets on two days of chaos after a 12-story oceanfront condo tower partially collapsed in Surfside, the small town’s tight-knit Jewish community is welcoming in Shabbat, a time of week when observant Jews traditionally refrain from work and technology.
Some are taking the time to pray for a sliver of good news, a sigh of relief or simply a bit of closure.
The catastrophic collapse, which has killed four and left 159 more missing in the rubble early Thursday morning, has left the community reeling. On Friday, friends and family were bracing for bad news but praying for peace.
“Shabbat sort of divides and separates the rest of the week; the mundane to the holy,” said Mark Baranek, the director of Congregational Engagement at Temple Beth Shalom in Miami Beach. Baranek said two families from the congregation escaped the collapsed Champlain Tower South Condo, but that he was still waiting to hear from a former student and his family.
“This Shabbat in particular, people are looking for some type of tranquility,” he said. “Man plans and God laughs. Who could have ever known.”
While Shabbat — which is observed sundown Friday through sundown Saturday — is a day of rest and therefore restricts Jews from working, the laws are set aside in the case of a life-threatening emergency.
There is “an overarching principle though that kind of exceeds in its rigor all the other commandments and that’s the commandment to preserve life,” said Jacob Solomon, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.
“If there were an observant Jew among the search and rescue teams, you could be sure that they will continue to work, because they would be involved in potentially saving a life,” he said.
Yankie Andrusier, the son-in-law of Rabbi Sholom Lipskar of the Shul of Bal Harbour, stressed that Jewish law mandates exceptions to its own rules in times of crisis.
“When it comes to saving a life, there is no such thing as Judaism or religion,” he said. “You have to break the Shabbat if you need to save someone. In other words, if I saw someone on the street choking, I’m allowed to pick up the phone on Shabbat and dial 911.”
Andrusier said that he and other Orthodox volunteers, including those with Jewish-led volunteer emergency medical services group Hatzalah, will continue their services “round the clock” to the community through the traditional day of rest, while “trying not to use electronics, if they don’t need to.”
“This is like a mini 9/11 for us, except for the fact that it wasn’t an act of terrorists, it was an act of God,” he said.
Solomon, of the Federation, said it still wasn’t clear Friday what percent of the residents in the building are Jewish, but called the neighborhood “a pretty densely populated Jewish area.”
“It is true that a very large, disproportionate percent of the people who are impacted by this tragedy may be Jewish,” he said. “So it’s kind of natural that there would be a very strong and clear Jewish presence, with a lot of humility in terms of knowing the limits of what we can do.”
While there is a mix of traditional Jews, young professionals and those who are secular, Solomon said “it is considered a Jewish neighborhood, and I think there is a sense of community that runs through Jewish blood.”
“Everything about the Jewish religion is based on operating as a community,” he said. “And there is a sense of mutual responsibility, there is a sense of accountability to each other, and there are behavioral imperatives about helping each other and helping the strangers, who are not Jewish as well.”
Locally the community sprung into action, coordinating donations for displaced families and bringing in spiritual leaders to help those in mourning or those waiting to hear from the missing. The Chabad of South Broward circulated its own list of the missing, and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation partnered with other organizations to collect donations.
Richard Silverstein, a longtime member of the Shul of Bal Harbour, said when he arrived at the family reunification center early Thursday he immediately noticed the lack of available kosher food.
Although the American Red Cross had provided snacks, and food from chains like Pizza Hut and Burger King was plentiful throughout the community center, observant Jewish families of collapse victims were lacking.
Silverstein, 58, knew what to do. Calling friends in the neighborhood, there was soon kosher pizza from local shops filling the center, and on Friday, boxes of challah, kosher chicken lunches, muffins, and grape juice were stacked in piles.
“The first responders need to eat,” said Silverstein, relieved that Hatzalah volunteers got sustenance.
Later Friday, Shabbat plans were put into place to give out-of-town visitors and affected families a warm meal and a place to pray.
Isack Merenfeld, a member of Skylake Synagogue, an Orthodox shul in North Miami Beach, said Thursday that he quickly rented a U-Haul and brought his two sons along to help unload the donations.
With the Sabbath approaching on Friday night, the observant Jewish community has collected separate boxes of challah, wine, and other necessities for the weekly ritual day of rest.
At the Shul of Bal Harbour, Kayla Schochet, 36 and her husband, 40-year-old Dov Schochet, were preparing to welcome a large group to their shul for Shabbat, including Schochet’s brother Eli, a Hatzalah emergency volunteer who traveled to Surfside from Hallandale Beach to be closer in case he is needed.
“I hope by the time we light our candles tonight, we have good news,” Kayla Schochet said.
A steady flow of donations poured into the shul Thursday, where around 20 volunteers unloaded crates of food, blankets, and more to be distributed to community members who were displaced. A verified GoFundMe fundraiser hosted by the shul had raised more than $100,000 Thursday night. The Federation, which set up its own campaign, had received more than 2,500 donations by Friday afternoon.
Mendel’s Backyard BBQ, a Kosher barbecue restaurant one block from the shul, is offering free-of-charge Shabbat dinner to anyone — Jewish or not — impacted by the condo collapse.
Maria Raquel, the restaurant’s event coordinator, said 90 people responded that they plan to attend. Forty others have ordered Mendel’s food, Raquel said in a phone interview while delivering those free dinners directly to the Grand Beach Hotel, where displaced families were relocated to Friday.
Those families who choose to dine at Mendel’s will be treated to tables overflowing with Jewish American staples like brisket, roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, salmon, chicken soup, gefilte fish — and of course, challah and grape juice, to mark the Shabbat meal.
Young Israel of Bal Harbour, another Orthodox synagogue in the neighborhood, also hosted an open-invitation Shabbat dinner for those impacted by the tragedy.
Steve Eisenberg, a member of the congregation who has close friends among those missing, said 50 to 60 people are expected to attend.
“Now is not the time to ask why,” Eisenberg, said. “Now is the time to say, ‘What can I do to make a difference in people’s lives?’”
Rabbi Gidon Moskovitz, the newly hired spiritual leader of Young Israel of Bal Harbour, wasn’t supposed to start until September, but when he heard about the tragedy in his future community, he got on a plane.
“A congregant came up to me in Houston after prayer and showed me what was going on,” Moskovitz said. “I thought, that’s where I need to be.”
Beyond comforting the community and keeping one another fed and cared for, the Jewish tradition also requires a more serious responsibility: to arrange for funerals and burials as soon as possible with little to no waiting period.
Religious leaders say plans will likely begin on Sunday.
Andrusier is a member of Chevra Kadish of South Florida, a Jewish burial society. He said in addition to praying for the missing, he is standing by in case he and others will be called to aid in burials as bodies are pulled from the rubble.
Jewish law, Andrusier said, dictates an obligation for someone to constantly attend to the body, reciting certain prayers, until the person has been buried.
“In Jewish law, when you die you have to go back to your maker. It’s important,” he said. “It’s not good for the body to be lingering.”
Around the country and even the globe, the response has been swift.
“Even one Jewish person is the world to us,” Shochet said, noting the amount of outreach from friends and family around the world. “Even if one family is affected, it affects all of us.”
Israel’s consul general in Miami, Maor Elbaz Starinsky, said he offered immediate aid to Surfside after the collapse and said he received phone calls from Israel’s Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Diaspora instructing him to offer “any possible help” to the communities impacted by the collapse.
“We bought medications, a couple thousand dollars worth of medications for Hatzalah,” Starinsky said, referring to the South Florida branch of the Jewish-led volunteer emergency services group that has aided first responders.
Starinsky also said he extended offers to Florida and Miami officials to fly in a team of forensics and search-and-rescue experts from Israel to Miami.
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