The Israel Defense Forces assisting with the search and rescue efforts in the Surfside, FL condo collapse turned down the offer of free hotel rooms in favor of sleeping in tents to be closer to the site of the tragedy.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that a team from Israel has been dispatched to aid in rescue efforts at the Surfside building collapse that left at least nine dead and dozens unaccounted for. pic.twitter.com/VMmu8fCATG
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 27, 2021
The Daily Wire reports:
Bal Harbour Mayor Gabriel Groisman told Arutz Sheva 7 that “the rescue workers are working as fast as they can, in a very difficult worksite, with very difficult conditions,” but noted that it was still “a long process, it’s a slow process for the families.”
“News is starting to come in now for the families, more and more, unfortunately we haven’t had good news in a couple days, and the pressure continues to build,” he said. “I visited the site several times a day since this started, for hours upon hours, and the rescue workers are working at full capacity, they have heavy machinery there, they’re working, everybody wants it to be faster. It’s never fast enough, but they have to do it in a careful way to make sure that they don’t hurt the site in the sense that they’re not hurting other people that are there in the rubble.”
“I can tell you personally that I spoke a lot to the family members; I spent most of my time with the family members, and those from the Jewish community were begging for the Israelis to come in,” Groisman said. “I was able to organize hotel rooms for the search and rescue team; it was donated by a local hotel here, and when they showed up we told them that we had hotel rooms for them actually on the beach so they can rest and they rejected the hotel rooms. They want to stay in the tents on the site with the rest of the team; they’re here to work.”
“I hope that at some point they get a moment to rest, but they say that they’ll rest when they get home,” Groisman concluded. “We just had at the shul in Bal Harbour here with Rabbi Lipsker, we had a big community service to pray for the victims and to support the rescue workers. And I can tell you that people not just from all parts of the Jewish religion but from other religions came to join us. This is a very tight-knit community and together we’re doing what we can to pray, to hope to bring a big, big [miracle] for the families.”
