The commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit said Tuesday the collapsed bedrooms from the Champlain Towers South building are under 13 to 16 feet of concrete. “This building collapsed very, very badly, if I can use this word, because it collapsed into itself. And the bedrooms that we are looking for, because the people [slept] in the bedrooms are under four or five meters of concrete,” Col. Golan Vach, commander of the Israeli National Rescue Unit, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday. Vach said his team is comprised of 15 people who are mostly engineers and search and rescue experts. He said his team found new spaces in the rubble to search Monday and Tuesday. “So there is still hope,” Vach said. “Until one week, I have a solid hope that we will find someone.

Florida Governor DeSantis met on Tuesday with family members of victims missing in the Surfside condo collapse. Among those that the Governor met was the Rosenberg family, who are R”L missing three family members. An eye-witness told YWN that the Governor showed the family compassion and comfort, as well as providing the family members with hope and clear updated information on the search and rescue operations. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

The slow work of sifting through the remnants of a collapsed Florida condo building stretched into a sixth day Tuesday, as families desperate for progress endured a wrenching wait for answers. “We have people waiting and waiting and waiting for news,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters Monday. “We have them coping with the news that they might not have their loved ones come out alive and still hope against hope that they will. They’re learning that some of their loved ones will come out as body parts. This is the kind of information that is just excruciating for everyone.” The work has been deliberate and treacherous. Just two additional bodies were found Monday, raising the count of confirmed dead to 11.

The president of the Champlain South Towers condo association, in an April letter, wrote that damage to the garage had gotten significantly worse since a 2018 inspection and that the concrete deterioration of the building was “accelerating,” according to reports Monday. At least 11 people have died and more than 150 are still missing after the condo partially collapsed early Thursday in Surfside, Florida. Rescue workers continue to search for survivors in the rubble. In the April 9 letter, the condo board president, Jean Wodnicki, wrote how the building was in desperate need of repairs, and she urged residents to pay millions of dollars in assessments needed to fix structural problems.

The Mayor of Bal Harbour said Monday that all death-related Jewish customs and laws are being practiced at the site of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida. “To clarify, all of the Jewish customs and laws related to passing and the way you handle the deceased are being observed and respected,” Mayor Gabriel Groisman told CNN’s Poppy Harlow Monday. Groisman said there is a team of around 20 people on the ground who are ensuring remains and bodies are handled properly. “I just walked out of a meeting of about 20 people in charge of making sure that any remains or bodies that are found, from the moment they are pulled out of the site, are not just treated with respect but in accordance to Jewish law and it’s important for families to know that,” Groisman said.

As rescue efforts at the site of the Surfside disaster continue, more and more details of the horrific events are being revealed. Despite the immensity of the tragedy, with 33 Jews still missing (two were found) as well as over 100 non-Jews, some of the residents experienced nissim and survived the disaster. One frum family, the Nir family, managed to escape a minute before the building collapsed. The mother of the family, Sora Nir, told B’Chadrei Chareidim how she and her children were spared from certain death. Sora, a mother of 6, had returned that night from a Chabad gathering after midnight and began hearing ominous creaking sounds. At first, she thought someone was doing home construction work and wondered who would do such noisy construction work at such a late hour.

One more body has been discovered in the rubble of the partial collapsed building in Surfside, Florida, bringing the number of people killed 10, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said on Monday. She said 151 people are still unaccounted for and 135 have been accounted for. “Our detectives are working in realtime right now to audit this list. We’re receiving multiple calls, still, from family members about the same loved ones and the information is coming from various sources,” Cava said. The mayor stressed that the priority of the operation remains rescuing possible survivors. Florida Gov.

The mayor of Surfside, Florida, described a chance meeting with a 12-year-old girl at the Champlain Towers South collapse site Sunday night that “hit me the hardest.” “Last night, when I did my late night pass at the building there was little girl. She’s about 12 years old and she was sitting by herself,” Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Monday. Burkett said he knew the little girl from a previous encounter and understood that either her mother or father was a victim of the Surfside collapse. Burkett said he found her sitting near the rubble pile scrolling through prayers on her cell phone “all by herself.” “She was reading a Jewish prayer to herself, sitting at the site, by where one of her parents presumably is,” the mayor said. “And that broke my heart.

The bodies of Leon, z’l, and Ruth Oliwkowicz, z’l, residents of the Champlain Towers South residential building in Surfside, were found over the weekend, the police announced on Sunday. Aryey Oliwkowicz, 79, and Ruth Oliwkowicz (Christina Beatriz Elvira), 74, were originally from Venezeula. They are the parents of Mrs. Leah Fouhal, a member of the Chabad community in Chicago, Collive reported. In 2019, Aryeh and Ruth donated a Sefer Torah to Sefer Torah to Yeshivas Ohr Eliyahu – Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, where their daughter works as a secretary. Aryeh, z’l, proudly spoke in Yiddish at the event about his happiness in donating the Sefer Torah in memory of his parents.

After the building collapse on early Thursday morning, Hatzalah South Florida has had a non-stop continuous 24 hour- a -day presence at the disaster site in Surfside, Florida. While rumors of a slowed rescue response have popped up on social media, Hatzalah South Florida Director Baruch Sandhaus wants the public and community to know that he has personally witnessed a non-stop multi-agency rescue effort since the disaster began, with enormous resources being brought in as the scene safely allows.