Three years after the Oct. 7 massacre, Yehuda Avidan, director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Religious Services, has offered a harrowing account of what unfolded behind the gates of the Shura military base, where hundreds of bodies were brought for identification following the Hamas-led attack.

In an extensive interview, Avidan described taking responsibility for the civilian victims within hours of the massacre, working virtually without sleep as bodies poured into Shura, confronting horrifying cases of mutilation and abuse, and participating in the extraordinary halachic effort required to identify victims and prevent women from being left as agunos.

Avidan, an Ashdod resident, said he learned early on the morning of Oct. 7 that something far beyond an ordinary terrorist attack was taking place.

“Because I don’t live in a chareidi neighborhood, the news reached me very quickly, already at 8:00 in the morning. A neighbor came to me and showed me pictures of the vehicle in Sderot, the jeep. When I saw the white pickup truck in Sderot, I told him, ‘My brother, we are in a world war.’ By the end of the holiday, I already knew that we were looking at hundreds of murdered people — while television was showing only 130.”

Under the legal structure in place at the time, responsibility for civilian fatalities belonged to the Interior Ministry. Avidan said that by the conclusion of the holiday, however, he understood that an entirely different system would be required to handle the scale of the catastrophe.

“The first two phone calls I made at the end of the Yom Tov were to Interior Minister Moshe Arbel and Religious Services Minister Michael Malchieli. I told Moshe Arbel, ‘My brother, forget it, you cannot handle these fatalities. This is my field. I am taking responsibility for all of it as though the government decision has already taken effect. Tell your people that I am taking responsibility for this issue.’ He told me, ‘Accepted. Thank you very much. I thank you. It is also absolutely the right thing.’ I put him on a conference call together with Malchieli, we agreed that I would receive responsibility, and from that moment, the rest is history.”

By 8:30 the following morning, Avidan was already holding a conference call with senior ministry officials and the country’s major chevros kaddisha. His instructions reflected the numbers he feared were coming.

“The next day at 8:30 a.m., I was already on a conference call with the entire senior leadership of my ministry and the large chevros kaddisha. I instructed each of them to dig 50 graves around the country and begin preparing. I was simply trying to understand how I was going to handle this thing, all based on personal intuition.”

Half an hour later, approximately 150 people — including Religious Services Ministry officials, religious council leaders and representatives of chevros kaddisha — joined an emergency Zoom meeting.

“At 9:00 in the morning, I scheduled a management meeting at the ministry with the minister and all the heads of the religious councils and chevros kaddisha — there were 150 of us on Zoom. There I made two very simple decisions: First — there are no rules, there are no regulations, do what needs to be done, don’t ask questions. When the accountant and legal adviser began asking questions, I told them: ‘There are no rules, there are no laws, do whatever needs to be done, you have my authorization. Whoever sues you — I will back you.’”

Avidan also decided that all civilian bodies requiring preparation for burial would initially be directed to a single location in Rishon LeZion because of the severe condition in which many victims were being recovered.

“At the same time, I made an immediate decision that I was activating one place in the country to receive all the bodies for preparation for burial — and that was Rishon LeZion, because I understood that the condition of the bodies was not good and kavod hameis required it. At 12:00 we went down to Shura, and from that moment my place of residence was Shura Camp and Rishon LeZion.”

When Avidan arrived at Shura, he found senior representatives of the police, military, Health Ministry and other agencies attempting to respond to a catastrophe on a scale none of the existing systems had been designed to handle.

“I arrived there as a relatively new director-general, only eight or nine months into the job. You come, and suddenly standing next to you are Deputy Commissioner Yoav Telem, Deputy Commissioner Shlomit Landes, Lahav 433 personnel. Suddenly you see deputy commissioners everywhere, the Health Ministry, the police, the army… They didn’t even know what the role of the Religious Services Ministry was.”

Within hours, Avidan said, it became clear that the overlapping responsibilities threatened to create chaos.

“By the afternoon, I already understood that it was beginning to become a mess, and I announced: ‘Gentlemen, according to the law, I am responsible for the identification. I am responsible for everything concerning the fatalities.’ From that moment, I took command and began coordinating the entire operation. The police were responsible for the identification, and we began working like machines.”

The identification of civilians posed challenges substantially different from those involving soldiers. The military had extensive identifying information readily available for its personnel, while civilian records were scattered among different government agencies and databases.

“Unlike the army, where identification can take half an hour because they have all the data, with us, among civilians — anyone who had not been in the army, his information did not come up. It took us a day or two to arrange the transfer of information between the agencies, and then things began moving.”

What followed were days and nights confronting scenes Avidan said remain seared into his memory: hundreds of victims, many burned beyond recognition, alongside evidence of horrific abuse inflicted during the massacre.

Among the most wrenching episodes was the case of a father and daughter whose fate remained uncertain. An instinct that something was wrong ultimately led authorities to reopen a grave, where investigators made an extraordinary discovery: the father and daughter had died together, still embracing one another.

The immense identification challenge also created grave halachic questions. In cases where a married man could not conclusively be identified, his wife could potentially remain an agunah, unable to remarry without sufficient evidence of her husband’s death.

To address those cases, a discreet halachic committee was established under the leadership of then-Rishon LeZion Rav Yitzchak Yosef. Working largely outside the public eye, the committee examined the most complicated identification cases and the evidence available in each one, seeking halachically valid grounds to establish deaths and release women from the status of agunah.

The work at Shura ultimately became one of the least visible but most painful fronts of the aftermath of Oct. 7. Behind the casualty figures were teams required to examine what remained after the massacre, establish identities, preserve kavod hameis, return victims to their families and confront unprecedented halachic questions — all while new bodies continued arriving.

{Matzav.com}