After the partial collapse of a twelve-story apartment building in the US state of Florida, the number of recovered fatalities has risen again. Two more victims were found in the rubble, said the mayor of Miami-Dade district, Daniella Levine Cava, on Wednesday evening (local time) at the accident site in Surfside near Miami. The number of deaths has increased to 18 – including two children between the ages of four and ten. Almost 150 people are still missing, according to Levine Cava.
The building near the beach with around 130 residential units had partially collapsed on Thursday night. The misfortune surprised people in their sleep. Since then, a desperate search for possible survivors has been going on. It’s a race against time. Rescue teams are on duty around the clock – with sniffer dogs, special cameras, listening instruments and heavy equipment.
It was a grim Shabbat for the Surfside Jews.
Israel also sent a ten-person delegation with experts from disaster relief to help with the recovery and to support the Jewish community in identifying victims and survivors. According to media reports, many of the missing are Jewish. Numerous families fear for their relatives.
sabbath It was a grim Shabbat for the Surfside Jews. As reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the Chabad synagogue “The Shul of Bal Harbor” published the names of 40 Jewish missing persons on Friday so that they can be prayed for. Cantor Shimshon Tzubeli, who leads Sephardic worship at the Shul, walked through the crowd with a notebook and asked for contact information from evacuees and volunteers to bring people together for Shabbat meals.
A WhatsApp network called volunteers to the community center to distribute food, bed linen and clothes to the evacuees.
As JTA reported, the question of how to plan the funerals has now arisen. Jacob Solomon, president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, said in an interview: “It is likely that a significant number of people will need help organizing the funerals.”
In the community center, however, many families and friends did not want to acknowledge the finality of the situation on Friday and whispered their fears to one another.
The Chabad Synagogue “The Shul of Bal Harbor” published the names of 40 missing Jews on Friday.
“Many will need counseling and trauma counseling,” said Rabbi Jonathan Tabachnikoff, who works at a local children’s hospital and walked up to people on Friday and asked quietly if they wanted to talk. “It will be a long and difficult journey,” he said in an interview with JTA.
Identify Meanwhile, over the weekend, police released the names of four identified fatalities who had already been found on Thursday and Friday: a 54-year-old woman, a 54-year-old man and an elderly couple aged 79 and 83.
Mayor Levine Cava said at the weekend that the search forces had also found other unidentified “human remains”. It was not more specific. Identification is not easy, she stressed. DNA tests would be used here. DNA samples were collected from relatives for this purpose. She emphasized that the emergency services continued to try to find survivors. Don’t give up. More than 35 people have been rescued so far.
The cause of the partial collapse remains a mystery.
In order to release additional funds and material after the accident, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had declared a state of emergency. This was confirmed by President Joe Biden on Friday so that federal funds could also be made available. The disaster control agency FEMA is also involved.
backgrounds The cause of the partial collapse remains a mystery. The residential complex known as Champlain Towers South dates from the 1980s. At the weekend, a 2018 inspection report by an outside company became public, in which experts listed several defects, including major structural defects in the building’s concrete. Whether these could be in any way related to the collapse remained open.
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