Faced with heartbreaking devastation, even the toughest seasoned first responders found themselves working on autopilot — and then broke down 

Photos: Flash 90

There’s something almost mythical about the heroes in the orange vests – maybe it’s in part because of those inspiring tribute songs with the sirens in the background — always there at the worst tragedies, doing everything humanly possible to save lives, and then going back to whatever they do until the next tragedy, accident, or terror attack. There is a certain security in their presence, a knowledge that if the men in the orange vests are there, everything will be all right.

But ask some of the Hatzolah volunteers who were in Meron on Lag B’omer and you’ll find that these tough, brave men who take war and terror attacks in stride aren’t feeling very heroic. They’re living with the scenes, the sounds, and the smells, and less than a week later, the disaster is still a dark shadow over every waking moment. The 45 deaths and multiple injuries — people from their own communities who just minutes before had their arms raised heavenward in joyous dance and song as the flames of the holy bonfires rose together with their voices — extracted a toll too much even for them.

Longtime ZAKA volunteer Motti Buktzin has been coming to Meron on Lag B’omer for the past 28 years as a private citizen, and this year was no different, as he happily joined in the euphoric circles of dancers — but suddenly, the Hatzolah monitor he always carries began squawking and wouldn’t stop. [ZAKA deals with proper care of the dead, while Hatzolah is a first-responder organization, although there is a lot of overlap among the membership. -Ed.]

Someone shouted “I’m in the middle of CPR!” and then another screamed in desperation, “I’m in the middle of CPR!”

It was surrealistic, a shaken, sadder Motti said later, describing how he approached the area of the tragedy, and together with the Magen David Adom station head began to count bodies, hoping against hope that the numbers would plateau. “It was an indescribable trauma for all of us.”

Shalom Klein, head of personnel for the 120 volunteers in Hatzolah’s northern Jerusalem region, said he was getting phone calls all day Friday from wives of volunteers whose husbands were affected in ways the women — always bulwarks of support for their spouses — had never seen before.

The sheer scale of the scene, with tens of thousands of people shifting from joy to horror in a matter of minutes, was too much for some of these battle-hardened rescuers to bear, even as they made valiant efforts to resuscitate what in the end were lifeless bodies — many of them children.

“My mother was in Meron,” says Shalom, “and she refused to leave, even as they were evacuating the crowd. She said, ‘Shalom, I’m not leaving until I see that you’re in one piece.’ And I guess she knew what she was talking about. After five hours on the scene, I was shattered.”