A week after the Swords of Iron war began, Avigail Gimpel found herself working back-to-back shifts, preparing victims’ bodies for burial, all because of a friendship.
When her close friend Stella Frankl passed away eight years ago, Neveh Daniel resident Gimpel wanted to do something in her memory.
“Stella had been a member of the chevra kadisha [Jewish burial society] in Maryland, and that really inspired me,” she told the Magazine.
Gimpel joined the chevra kadisha of Gush Etzion but didn’t get called on too often.
“I was very not active because there are so many women volunteers,” she said. In fact, in eight years, Gimpel had participated in exactly one tahara (ritual preparation of a Jewish body before burial).
That changed on October 14, when her husband, Daniel, who had been preparing the bodies of male victims and digging graves, asked her to help. The initial volunteers were all men, but after a few days, as more bodies were identified and released for preparation, the need for teams of women became relevant. This is because, by Jewish law, only women prepare female bodies for burial, and men prepare male bodies.
The combination of her husband’s involvement and her experience with a single previous tahara was enough to qualify Gimpel.
“I have no medical background,” she noted. However, she said, “I knew that I could stomach being with a dead body.” She explained that those preparing the body must be “in very close contact [with the deceased] and I knew I wasn’t squeamish.”
Gimpel is now one of just a handful of women in Israel trained to do this kind of heart-wrenching work with terror victims.
Zaka, Israel’s volunteer search and rescue organization, retrieved bodies from the kibbutzim near Gaza and the Supernova music festival site and brought them to a central location to be identified. Gimpel said that, in addition to DNA and dental records, a number of bodies were identified through what she termed “tattoo identification.” She clarified that Jewish law allows Jews to work on identifying bodies even on Shabbat. So a full week after the murderous rampage concluded, Israel’s forensic teams spent the entirety of the Shabbat of October 13-14 identifying bodies.
Once the bodies had been identified, they were brought to the chevra kadisha of Rishon Lezion to be prepared for burial.
GIMPEL’S FIRST shift began Saturday night October 14 and lasted until 1 a.m. That night, there were four teams, two each of six women and six men.
“I knew as I headed out [to start that shift], I would be a different person when I came home,” she said.
Gimpel stated that this work came with “unique challenges because of the conditions of the bodies. No one has done this kind of work since the Yom Kippur War. All of us were learning on the job.
“I wasn’t scared,” she said. “I was in a space of prayer that I would be able to do this in the most respectful way for these people who were so brutally murdered. I can’t fully find the words to describe it. The brutality I saw was outrageous, [a result of] people trying to impose as much harm and suffering on our people as possible.
“The next day was Rosh Hodesh. I was trying to pull myself together when I got an emergency call.” She had hardly slept and was in the middle of a [Zoom] meeting with a client in America at the time.
“I was told, ‘There are more bodies. You have to come quickly.’”
Her client encouraged her to end their meeting immediately and answer the emergency call.
“Let me do this mitzvah. You go,” her client insisted.
Gimpel quickly changed into clothes that could be tossed out at the end of her second shift and drove back to Rishon Lezion. “I had this fire inside of me. I wanted to keep going until every single body was buried. I raced out the door because I knew how much these families were suffering, and we had to get the job done.
“The second day was even more complicated,” she reported. “Only three women showed up for the team. The work was much more challenging. To do it quickly and respectfully really pushed us to our limits.”
It was the tiny remnants of life that made the deepest impression on Gimpel: the grandmother who had just gotten her nails polished a vibrant red; the young woman whose pocketbook containing her phone, her keys, and other personal effects was still attached; the little girl whose body was stopped in mid-motion.
EIGHT DAYS later, Gimpel had participated in preparing 40 to 50 bodies of girls and women for burial.
Then, “last Thursday, the whole endeavor came to a screeching halt because 20% of the bodies are unidentifiable. We’re distraught that we can’t finish this, that there are Jewish bodies that couldn’t be buried,” she confessed. “There were no more bodies to bury. That was the next massive tragedy because they couldn’t be identified. What more punishment could a family deal with?” she implored.
Reflecting on the frantic pace of the horrifyingly difficult task, Gimpel said: “What’s giving me a lot of strength is knowing that all these holy women who were killed al kiddush Hashem [because they were Jews] are sitting at God’s throne.
“It’s not an accident that I was given the opportunity to spend their last few moments on this Earth with them.”
She spoke about the bond of sisterhood she felt with the other women she worked with and the positive impact of their ability to process the trauma as they were confronted by it.
“The fact that we, as a group of women, were able to bring these bodies to burial, to send them back to their families, has given us strength,” she shared.
Gimpel feels encouraged by having seen the Jewish people come together to help bring so many victims to burial in accordance with Jewish law.
“My only optimism comes from us being able to come together and work shoulder to shoulder. That’s our superpower. I felt the holiness.
“If we can unleash that superpower, we can do whatever we need to get our land back and to have safety. We can do this on our own, if we can be unified,” she declared.
Since wrapping up frenetic activity, Gimpel reflected that “davening [praying] has been harder. I weep my way through the davening on Shabbos. My body lets go a little, and I am able to allow the emotions to flow through.”
Gimpel and her husband first came to Israel two days after their wedding in 1998. Though they intended to return to the US to complete their education, a pressing need for health insurance due to Avigail’s first pregnancy convinced the couple to pivot and make aliyah instead.
Except for a few years spent in Moscow working in the family business, Avigail and Daniel have been in Israel ever since. All six of their children were born in Israel.
When not pressed into service during war, Gimpel is a best-selling author and has been working with those impacted by ADHD for over 25 years. Her oldest child is 24, and her youngest is 13. She has one son serving on the Gaza border.
From her perspective as an eyewitness, Gimpel posted three powerful videos to social media.
“After the first two to three days, I saw that we had Holocaust [era] denial from something that [had just] happened [the previous] weekend. People were denying the cruelty and the horrors of what [the victims] went through before they were murdered.
“I needed to shout that [truth] out to the world [because] these women don’t have a voice. I wanted the world to know what they had suffered and that it was real and it was only because they were Jewish.
“I never expected to see evil so up close, and that has definitely changed me. I’m a Western, liberal New Yorker. We had this firm belief that, under the right conditions, everyone wants to be good.
“Turns out, it’s just not true. We have to get that through our stubborn hard heads,” she concluded.