18 months after Oct. 7, remains of many victims still not identified

A controversy has arisen between the military rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Services concerning additional testing of the remains.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Hundreds of body bags containing hundreds of unidentified remains of October 7 victims are still unburied a year and a half after the massacre.

Although there are solutions to identify the remains in body bags, which are kept at the National Center for Casualties of Israel’s Defense Forces in Camp Shura, a controversy has arisen between the military rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Services concerning how to proceed.

The chief rabbi of the IDF, Rabbi David Yosef, proposes additional testing to positively identify remains so they can be buried properly.

The IDF has even earmarked funds for additional identification of the remains.

However, Yehuda Avidan, Director General of the Ministry of Religious Services, opposes additional testing because he considers it a waste of resources and a “desecration of the dead.”

Avidan maintains that his stance is based on the opinion of Dr. Chen Kugel, who heads the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

The Ministry of Religious Services has considered burning the remains in a mass grave without identification, a move that the military rabbinate strongly opposes.

While the Ministry of Religious Services and the military rabbinate have reached an impasse on the decision, the remains still have not been buried, but a final decision is expected to arise from a meeting of the various organizations.

Shlomo Efrati, who identified bodies for the IDF, described the difficulty of his task to Israel’s Channel 12 TV network.

Efrati and his reserve unit were called up on October 8 and worked at Camp Shura, where the IDF Rabbinate worked quickly to identify over 1,000 thousand bodies and prepare them for proper burial.

Efrati and his partner, Oded Kind, took fingerprints of civilians such as Nova festival participants, kibbutz residents, police officers, and soldiers who were brought by trucks in body bags.

About the difficult job, he said, “Everyone who was there fell apart in their own way; it got to all of us in the end.”

Efrati protected himself during the trauma by “going into automatic mode,” he said, to look only for the hands and taking the fingerprints as quickly as he could. Still, he couldn’t avoid seeing the condition of the bodies, “the burned and the half-burned, the mangled, everything.”

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