💓 ZAKA OPERATIONAL UPDATE
▫️ SEARCH & RECOVERY AT SEA: NETANYA, HOF TZANZ BEACH
ZAKA's Special Units volunteers deploy year-round to missing person searches, sea and cliff recoveries, and at-risk individuals who need to be found before the clock runs out. The following is one such recent operation.
➖
On a Friday afternoon in early April, two brothers were swept out to sea at Hof Tzanz beach in Netanya. Yissachar Dov Spiegel z"l, 21, was pulled from the water in critical condition and rushed to Laniado Hospital. His younger brother, Avraham Yeshayahu z"l, 17, was missing.
ZAKA's Special Units - the Divers Unit, Drone Unit, Jet Ski teams, and Jeep Unit - deployed alongside the local Netanya team, working in full coordination with the Israel Police, the Marine Police, and the Lehava Unit (the elite unit of the Fire and Rescue Services).
Friends of the missing teen from his Tifrach yeshiva came down to walk the beach alongside the volunteers. Teams divided the coast into sectors, returned to points already scanned again and again, and worked through the night with flashlights and dedicated equipment.
By the fifth day - with the sea finally calm enough for divers to go deeper - a careful situational analysis redrew the search sectors. ZAKA's Special Units focused on the northern stretch around Blue Bay; the Marine Police and Lehava worked Hof Tzanz and southward.
Midway through the operation, Yissachar Dov z"l passed away at Laniado. Eliezer Lifschitz, head of ZAKA's Netanya team, left the dunes and went straight to the hospital to be with the parents. The funeral set out the next day from the family home in Jerusalem.
In the same hours that the family accompanied their elder son to his rest, the search for the younger continued without pause.
💬 "After a week of searching, we already know every meter of this ground - but we don't stop. We come back to the same places again and again, because we know that sometimes that's exactly where the moment comes when you find. We won't leave until we bring an answer to the family." - Eliezer Lifschitz, Head of ZAKA Netanya Team
That night, more than 250 civilians from across Israel - without any official call - arrived at Blue Bay in the middle of the night to join the search, fanning out along kilometers of coast with flashlights in hand.
On the tenth day, a sailing instructor leading a training cruise off the Herzliya coast spotted the missing teen in the water. With the direct intervention of Rabbi Asher Landau, head rabbi of the Forensic Medicine Institute, the identification process was completed quickly and with care. A ZAKA ambulance carried Avraham Yeshayahu z"l to his burial in Jerusalem that night.
💬 "This was a complex operation that lasted long days, and even after we found him we kept working with full determination to complete the identification and the release. It is a painful moment, but it also brings closure for the family after days of uncertainty." - Chaim Weingarten, ZAKA VP of Operations
➖
May the memory of Yissachar Dov z"l and Avraham Yeshayahu z"l be a blessing.
ZAKA thanks the Israel Police, the Marine Police, and the Lehava Unit for their partnership throughout the search.
As you read these words, ZAKA volunteers are responding to one of thousands of annual calls for help - they rely on you, our partners in true loving-kindness, to enable their work.
❤️ Please consider becoming the volunteers' partner in the mitzvahs of saving and honoring lives. Explore and support ZAKA's work:
give.zakaworld.org/pathway/