“We’ve been through so many things, terror attacks, travesties, but we’ve never seen anything like this,” a Chevra Kadisha member told Channel 13 News. “It never happened before that the morgue doors wouldn’t close because there were so many niftarim.”

Israel’s Chevrei Kadisha are on the frontlines of the harsh reality of Israel’s second coronavirus wave. What began as a “trickle” of 21 deaths in March slowly transformed into a deluge of deaths, with 643 deaths in September, and another 250 deaths since the beginning of October.

“At the beginning, when we had five niftarim a day, we felt like we were finished, we were collapsing,” a Chevra Kadisha member in Holon said. “Yesterday, we had 40 niftarim here.”

And if the number of niftarim isn’t heartbreaking enough, the Chevra Kadisha members added that many levayos lack even a minyan of participants since people are afraid to attend due to fear of contracting the coronavirus. In one heartrending case, a man in his 40s attended his father’s levaya completely alone with not even one other relative present.

As YWN reported last month, as the infection rate has steadily increased in Israel in the past few months, the Chevrei Kadisha began preparing for an increased amount of niftarim by acquiring refrigerated shipping containers that can hold hundreds of bodies. The first one was set up in Haifa and others have been set up in other cities as needed.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)