Among the dozens of rescuers desperately searching through the rubble of the collapsed Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida, was a team of five men, two women, and a dog named Oreo.
Clad in yellow T-shirts with a Magen David, they were volunteers from international Jewish humanitarian aid group Cadena. As they have done in disaster relief across continents, they worked unrelentingly, putting Jewish values into action.
“The volunteers really gave their heart. As soon as they were called, they put aside their day jobs, said goodbye to their spouses and children and, risking their lives, went to work, day and night, at this disaster site,” said Cadena’s director of international alliances, Miriam Kajomovitz, who is currently located in South Africa.
“We always go within a few hours wherever we are needed in the world. In Florida, the GoTeam [of emergency volunteers], even brought specialised technology that uses heat detection to find signs of life. They did all they could in every way but, sadly, this time, it was very hard to find people alive.”
Kajomovitz said the way in which the building fell made rescue efforts extremely difficult. “Usually a search and rescue mission takes place after something like an earthquake. In that situation, the building falls in different ways so you can get gaps in which people are found. But in Florida, the building fell like a sandwich, one layer on top of the other.
“Yet, we always had hope because in a previous mission in Nepal [after an earthquake in 2015] we found a person alive in the rubble after six days. However, although the volunteers worked through the night and tried everything they could, they were able to recover only dead bodies.”
The volunteers in Cadena’s team were from Mexico, and had been specially trained by Israel’s Rescue One. Like 8 000 other international Cadena volunteers offering various forms of humanitarian help, their day jobs range from doctor, engineer, student, psychologist, to everything in between. What they share is a passion for service and representing the Jewish community.
In Florida, besides the rescue team, Cadena also organised 20 psychologist volunteers who are continuing to debrief residents, family members of the deceased, and neighbours. In addition, it co-ordinated donations for those Tower residents who have lost everything.
This civil society organisation originally started amongst the Mexican Jewish community after Hurricane Stan hit the country in 2005. The community collected trailers full of donated food for the victims, but there was no one to deliver it, so five Jewish men did the delivery.
“When they got there, they saw how much misuse took place. Horrible things sometimes happen at scenes of humanitarian aid: food is used by men as weapons to get sexual favours, or it is stolen to be sold off.” After that, the community decided to form a group that would make sure that the help it offered would go where it was needed.
In terms of Cadena’s Jewish connection, Kajomovitz said, “We’re not religious; we’re not political. What we take is the culture of tikkun olam [repair the world] and make it a reality. Everything is done in the name of the Jewish community.”
In Latin America, for example, it’s clear that the public perception of the Jewish community has changed as a result of the work of Cadena, Kajomovitz said. People often saw the community as “closed in”, but now Cadena has gained so much respect for its work that many non-Jewish people chose to volunteer and global corporations have teamed up with it.
The organisation has 10 formal offices around the world, and has assisted hundreds of humanitarian missions and projects globally. It has three branches of service: emergency, education, and prevention, and will go wherever needed.
One of its newest offices is in South Africa, where it aims to serve as a beacon of hope not just for this country but the continent at large. Previously, it has sent volunteers to assist aid missions in Kenya and Mozambique. Now, it hopes to co-ordinate these kinds of efforts from a central office here. When it comes to South Africa’s humanitarian needs, the challenge is vast, Kajomovitz said. “To begin with, you don’t have emergencies, you live in one!
“It sounds strange, but normally with humanitarian aid, you have a hurricane and everyone pays attention, but when there are problems that have been going on for 55 years, it becomes normal. People often choose to ignore or just accept it.”
However, Cadena believes that there are powerful opportunities to bring change. Most recently, it has been working collaboratively on giving people who have access only to pit toilets a special powder that uses bacteria to eat up waste. It’s a project Cadena chose specifically because it wasn’t “sexy”, said Kajomovitz, and thus didn’t get much public attention.
Educational initiatives are also being introduced including an international competition in which school children are tasked with designing their own real-world solution to a social problem.
And, the organisation is hoping to begin training volunteers in emergency rescue to form GoTeams for disaster relief.
Although COVID-19 has curtailed some of its plans, Cadena is hoping to grow its connections to the South African Jewish community. Those interested in becoming a volunteer can contact Kajomovitz at miriam@cadena.ngo.
As Cadena builds up its presence in South Africa, it does so with humility. “We accept that we also need to learn if we want to help. Usually [humanitarian groups] never ask people what they want – we assume we know, and it’s not respectful. Instead, our job is to find out about it from the community itself,” Kajomovitz said.
Cadena also encourages a sense of humanity in its policy of “hand-to-hand” help. This means there is always direct contact between the giver and the receiver. One reason for this is to ensure that resources are distributed fairly and correctly, but there is a more profound reason. “We always try to create an interaction – that for that time period, we are just there together, and we can feel we are the same. I think that’s what will change the world at the end.”
