"The commander from the Israeli team did not hesitate, turned around and said, 'They've been doing exactly the right thing.'" "They wanted to know if the Israeli team thought that the Miami-Dade team had been doing the right thing," Burkett told reporters on Sunday. officials and the rabbi of the local synagogue near the disaster scene.Ĭharles Burkett, the mayor of the Miami suburb of Surfside where the disaster struck, described a meeting between the Israelis and families of the missing. Nachman Shai, Israel's minister for diaspora affairs, tweeted a picture of himself meeting with U.S. The Israeli rescuers come from the Israeli Defense Forces, the country's military, including about 10 reserve officers from the Home Front Command, along with Foreign Ministry personnel, the IDF said in a statement. But the crowds would also turn silent when asked, at moments when the rescuers needed quiet to listen for any buried survivors. They became known as fearless workers, putting their lives at risk to help others and traveling to disasters as far afield as Haiti, Nepal and the Philippines.Īfter a 2017 earthquake that leveled parts of Mexico City, they carried out their job before hundreds of people who gathered around destroyed buildings.Įasily spotted by their bright jumpsuits and helmets, they would be greeted with cheers and applause when arriving at a scene. The Topos formed as a volunteer search-and-rescue group in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985, saving lives in the working-class neighborhood of Tlatelolco where there had been a poor government response. They were on the ground in Florida on Friday, a day after the disaster, Miami-Dade officials said. Mexico's "Topos," the Spanish word for moles, are treated like heroes at home, earning fame for burrowing into piles of rubble in disasters the world over, including the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
"I for one can identify (with the families), from the Israeli experience."
"It's really painful," Maor Elbaz-Starinsky, the consul general of Israel in Miami, told WPLG television. More than two dozen of the missing were Jewish and had links to Israel, according to an Israeli official. A lot of the families who have unaccounted-for loved ones, wanted that," Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told a news conference on Sunday. "We did get a small team from Israel to come. If nothing else, the international presence is symbolic and may offer some solace, particularly to the local Jewish community. Local officials say they have plenty of help on hand and are rotating the rescue teams to keep personnel fresh. The exact roles of the Mexican and Israeli teams have not been detailed. Among those missing are relatives of Paraguay's first lady. Official briefings are delivered in Spanish and Haitian Creole in addition to English. The cooperation reflects the international nature of the Miami area, which is home to both Jewish and Latin American diasporas.
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