On June 24, 2026, two earthquakes shook northern Venezuela just 39 seconds apart. When I landed from Mexico with CADENA’s Go Team, a search and rescue unit, I immediately understood what that half-minute had done: buildings had been turned to rubble, families were waiting for any sign of life, and an entire country was holding its breath.

As a volunteer with CADENA, the global Jewish humanitarian organization, I have been trained as a LifeLocator TRx specialist. The device I operate is an ultra-wideband radar built to find what almost nothing else can: a person breathing as few as three times a minute, buried up to 12 meters beneath rubble. When everything else fails, that radar can still find life.

For five days, we worked in the hardest-hit areas: La Guaira and Caraballeda. I led the technological search at different collapsed sites, activating and coordinating more than 10 rescue cells. No two sites were alike, but the same protocol was used at every one: a physical search first, and then LifeLocator, sonar, drones, thermal and 360° cameras. We mapped the lowest-risk access routes and coordinated in real time with international teams on where to breach and how to extract. A psychologist traveled with us too, because part of the mission, maybe the most human part, was holding up the families waiting at the edge of the rubble. They were a constant reminder that where our technology ended, pain often began.

CADENA is the humanitarian arm of the world’s Jewish communities, but we didn’t go to Venezuela to help only the Jewish community. We went to help anyone trapped beneath the rubble, regardless of their religion, nationality, ethnicity, or politics. We flew high-tech equipment from Mexico to Venezuela, through collapsed airports and closed borders, because somewhere, someone was still breathing. That is tikkun olam (the Jewish value of repairing the world) in action.

Saving a life isn’t the only way to ease human suffering. There is kavod (dignity) in finding a person who couldn’t wait for us any longer. Resolving a search by recovering a body and enabling a final burial is its own form of rescue. Our team’s commitment to helping affected communities was never only to those still breathing. It always extended to those taken too soon, and to those who now have to go on living without them.

As a medical professional and rescue worker, I can say with certainty that none of us can fully understand our responsibility for one another. My team in Venezuela would calculate the fastest route to a stranger trapped beneath a collapsed building and risk everything to reach them. The Jewish diaspora carries that same instinct when our brothers and sisters anywhere are in crisis. We don’t ask if it’s our turn. We simply go. The obligation you feel to pull a stranger from the wreckage and the urge to cross the world for the Jewish people in moments of crisis comes from the same place: the certainty that no one gets left behind.

None of this would have been possible without the Jewish community of Venezuela. We arrived as strangers carrying technical equipment, and ended up eating and working side by side with families who opened their community, Hebraica, and homes to our team. This is yet another miracle that unfolded during this mission: the kinship of a people scattered across the world who recognize that we belong to one people. Even more so, I witnessed the warmth of the Latin American Jewish diaspora. We have a unique way of welcoming people, of saying “here’s a bed, a plate, a hug” before asking anything else. Mexicans and Venezuelan Jews are working on the ground as a single unit. We are sustained by the strength of people from all over the world we had never met before. We communicated in the same language, not only because we speak Spanish, but because we share a heritage that transcends international borders.

I came home physically exhausted. I also came home stronger. This deployment reaffirmed my conviction that being part of the Jewish people in Latin America means having family in every country in the region. Being part of this community means that a breath beneath the rubble, in Venezuela or anywhere else, is one we all share responsibility for. More than anything, it’s a reminder that tikkun olam is, at its core, an expression of love between our people and the world.