Champlain Towers

Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

Back in 1995, I covered the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building for The Oklahoman.

To many of us in Oklahoma, images of the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, seem “gut-wrenchingly similar” to the Murrah Building rubble 26 years ago.

Even the slow, excruciating search for victims — as loved ones pray for a miracle — stirs tearful reminders.

More than a week after the Miami-area condo building’s collapse, the fear is no longer that the missing won’t be found alive. It’s that “they may not be found at all, making it harder to know when and how to grieve those lost,” report the Wall Street Journal’s Alicia A. Caldwell, Valerie Bauerlein and Daniela Hernandez.

“The grief here is really deep,” Rabbi Ariel Yeshurun of the Skylake Synagogue in North Miami tells the Journal. “As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this.”

The disaster “has rocked Surfside’s Jewish community, a cohesive and interconnected group mirrored in just a few places in the United States,” explain the Washington Post’s Laura Reiley and Brittany Shammas.

Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron interviews Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, who leads the Shul of Bal Harbour, a synagogue that takes up nearly an entire city block less than a mile from the Champlain Towers.

More to read:

• ‘Now is not the time to ask why’: Surfside’s Jewish community ushers in somber Shabbat (by Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Carli Teproff and Samantha J. Gross, Miami Herald)

Jewish community prays for miracles after condo collapse (by Luis Andres Henao, Terry Spencer and Kelli Kennedy, Associated Press)

Miami-area churches pray for miracles, minister to rescue teams after condo collapse (by Kate Shellnutt, Christianity Today)


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