Credit: Jerusalem Post
On the final day of the recent Hadassah Hope and Healing national conference in Aventura, Florida, three Israeli doctors were scheduled to speak a final time, also giving the audience of 500 mostly women a chance to ask questions.
Two of the three doctors wanted to change the program.
Their stories are “usual,” they insisted. The third doctor’s story is unique, and they wanted to give her a chance to do a full presentation as opposed to being part of a panel.
If you’ve ever been to an America-based conference, you know that the program is written in stone and printed months ahead.
The two doctors who wanted to give up their slots aren’t actually “usual.”
One, a senior surgeon in his day job, has done hundreds of days of reserve duty treating the most severely wounded among 3,000 paratroopers. He has to decide, on the spot, whether to and how to evacuate soldiers under fire in Gaza and Lebanon. That requires weighing the soldier’s chances of survival by land evacuation or if he has to call in a helicopter crew under fire. Happily, every soldier he has evacuated has survived.
The other doctor rides in one of those helicopters, treating soldiers on the ground or flying over the battleground. In his day job, he heads an intensive care unit, treating seriously wounded civilians and soldiers.
Both doctors are so significant in their military roles that I cannot publish their names, although they’re both superheroes. Being Israelis, they were ready to pivot and change the program at the last minute. And they were stubborn about it.
The conference organizers agreed.
And so, after a short introduction and expressions of gratitude for the support they get from the American Hadassah members, they vacated the stage, leaving one speaker.
Grisly, gruesome, and inspiring
Her name is Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie.
She is the world expert at identifying the dead by their teeth.
She has been teaching Interpol colleagues at a meeting of 66 countries in France.
Her day job is head of the postgraduate program specializing in prosthodontics at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Dental Medicine. That means teaching dentists how to, among other things, return the smiles to civilians and soldiers. A subspecialty is treating children and young adults who have not developed a full set of teeth.
She and her teammates have also been repairing the faces of soldiers who have been shot in the head.
Her volunteer job for the Israel Police is head of the dental forensic unit. She is charged with determining the identity of deceased people via their teeth.
What words can describe her presentation? Grisly? Gruesome? Inspiring?
All of the above.
I was worried whether the audience would be able to tolerate it.
Oct. 7 response
Dr. Esi, as everyone calls her, first showed a family photo: her husband, three daughters, and two daughters’ boyfriends sitting around a dining table, enjoying the Sukkot holiday on October 6. One daughter and both boyfriends are soldiers.
On Oct. 7, Dr. Esi was about to take her usual morning run through Jerusalem. She’s slim and athletic, with hazel eyes and a brunette ponytail.
But then she received a WhatsApp from her police volunteer unit to prepare for service, and the sirens began to sound.
“What does that mean to prepare for service?” she asked. “No watching news. No social media. I need to come to the challenge with the clearest mind possible in order to do the work.”
She was in charge of 30 dentists, most of them colleagues from Hadassah’s dental school.
She had been called to identify bodies many times before, but no one could imagine the scope of the challenge on Oct. 7.
An unprecedented challenge
The bodies kept arriving, in civilian and military vehicles, in refrigerator trucks usually used to deliver frozen foods and chocolate milk.
The usual forensic facilities were too small. The site of examination of the 1,200 body bags is the Shura Base, the main base of the Military Rabbinate, south of Ramle.
“The identification had to be done speedily. How else could we know who of the missing was kidnapped?” Dr. Esi said.
The halls filled with body bags. They were scanned first because grenades were often embedded in the bodies and needed to be extracted by sappers.
The body bags often contained only pieces of the bodies. Sometimes the remains of more than one body were in the same bag.
Many bodies were incinerated remains, from which it is impossible to check fingerprints or DNA.
Sealed military biometric data, including DNA and dental X-rays, taken when a soldier enlists, were opened by special order.
Private and health fund dentists all over Israel needed to be contacted to find dental records for comparison. Many of the victims were not Israel-born. Dental records needed to be gathered from around the world.
Many of the victims came from Israel’s South. Special IDF units entered dentists’ offices while under rocket attacks and removed bullet-ridden drawers of handwritten files.
The Internet was searched for smiling photos that showed teeth.
Archaeologists sifted soil and ashes for teeth. Forensic anthropologists helped with bones.
The bodies were so mutilated that gender was often impossible to discern.
Dentists know teeth
Interpol software was helpful, but the dentists were even faster at matching images. “Dentists know teeth,” said Dr. Esi.
The photographs Dr. Esi showed made clear the difficulty of the examination: a jawbone discerned amid the ashes that lined up perfectly with a once-smiling grandmother. Crowns melted together in the extreme heat matched with dental work done years earlier.
Outside the facility, families whose loved ones were missing waited to hear the resolution.
Dr. Esi, in charge, could feel their presence.
Inside, the teams worked day and night, and day and night again. When their shift with the human remains ended, they called dentists and sought dental records. They were in a race with passing time with its decay, rain, and heat making the job harder.
When our soldiers entered Gaza and found bodies, they sent photos of their teeth. In uniform, Dr. Esi’s former dental residents went into Gaza death sites to examine teeth.Babies and toddlers have no dental records.
When a woman’s body was brought in with the Bibas children, Dr. Esi could tell immediately that the woman wasn’t Shiri Bibas.
When arch villain Yahya Sinwar’s body was brought in, Dr. Esi could instantly identify him.
She knows the teeth of every hostage in Gaza.
For 40 minutes, the 500 people in the conference hall sat silently. No one left the room, despite the difficult photos.
Was anyone not thinking of the Holocaust and the mass graves, the Babi Yar-like pits, the hill of ashes at Majdanek? Every person has a name, we say, but for so many there were no names.
Dr. Esi and her team gave them back their identity.
The audience rose to their feet as one, applauding for five minutes.
Even with the memory of Oct. 7, 2023, still fresh and the war continuing, we need a reminder. The world needs a reminder.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.