By Danae Bachenheimer
On June 24 at around 6:04 PM, I was sitting in a living room in Caracas, Venezuela, watching TV when the lights and the power suddenly went out. Honestly, if you live in Venezuela or have spent any time here, you know that a sudden power outage is just a normal Tuesday. Nobody panicked at first we just kind of paused waiting to see if the electricity was going to flick back on in a minute or if it was going to be one of those annoying long blackouts.
But then the ground started shaking. And it didn’t feel like a small tremor or a light rumble. The floor was moving so hard that before any one of us could really speak, we all ran toward the front door to stand under the door frame. I can’t recall every single detail because everything happened so fast and my head was spinning, but I can still vividly see the chandelier in the room. It wasn’t just swaying a little bit, it was swinging back and forth like a pendulum on a playground swing. Objects were falling off the shelves and shattering on the floor, making loud crashing noises mixed with the sound of the building cracking. I started seeing cracks quite literally forming on the walls right in front of my eyes.
Most of the moment is a blur but I remember that I stood there repeating the Shema Israel prayer over and over. I am not exaggerating when I say that I genuinely thought the entire building was about to collapse with all of us there trapped inside. Those 39 seconds between the first 7.2 magnitude earthquake and the second 7.5 shock felt like an eternity. You don’t realize how helpless you feel until the actual ground under your feet is shifting and there is nowhere safe to run.
When it finally stopped we didn’t wait around. We ran downstairs as fast as we could to get out into the street. Outside, everyone was standing around in a mix of shock and total confusion. Babies and toddlers were crying, elderly people were struggling to process what had happened, and car alarms were going off everywhere. Naturally, the first thing I tried to do was call my family to make sure they were okay, but the phone lines and cellular data were completely dead. The signal collapsed immediately across Caracas for a few minutes.
That feeling of not knowing if your family is healthy, while seeing videos of buildings you pass every day collapsing in seconds as if they were Lego towers is the worst thing I have ever experienced. After trying over and over again with no success, I managed to get a signal through to my brother who lives in the United States. I asked him to try calling our parents, grandma, aunts, uncles, and close family friends using international lines to see if he could get through. It took a while, but he eventually got in touch with them and put us in contact. I honestly did not feel okay until I heard their voices and knew they were safe.
Nobody knew if more aftershocks were coming or if the buildings were structurally safe to sleep in that night. So, my family and around 300 other families went to sleep at Hebraica, the Jewish community center, where many people in our community gathered to figure out what to do next.
As terrifying as it was in Caracas, the reality is that we were relatively lucky compared to what happened just over the mountain. La Guaira, along with other parts of the country near the epicenters, got hit ten times worse. The earthquakes destroyed entire neighborhoods, damaged main roads and left thousands of people with absolutely nothing in just 39 seconds. Across the country, the official reports, which many debate have been seriously modified, confirmed that over 5,500 people lost their lives, more than 16,000 were injured, at least 17,900 have completely lost their homes and 190 buildings have collapsed.
When something this catastrophic happens, one would expect chaos, but what stood out to me the most was how fast regular people jumped in to help. In La Guaira and other heavily damaged areas, everyday citizens who had zero official “search and rescue” training or heavy equipment didn’t wait around for official teams to arrive. They just went straight to the collapsed structures and started digging through concrete with their bare hands and whatever tools they could find. Because of those immediate volunteer efforts alongside international first responders, over 6,400 people were pulled out alive from under the rubble. It was a massive reminder of what solidarity actually means when everything else falls apart.
What made the response even more surreal and deeply moving was seeing aid arrive from Israel. Despite almost two decades without diplomatic relations and hostile political rhetoric from the regime, Israel didn’t hesitate to step in. The Israeli response was immediate by dispatching search and rescue teams, humanitarian aid and engineering experts, including IDF specialists and groups like IsraAID, SmartAID, NATAN and ZAKA. Seeing Israeli experts work side by side with Venezuelans on the streets of Caracas and La Guaira filled me and the entire Venezuelan Jewish community with pride.
These teams used their expertise and technology to pull people out from the rubble, evaluate structural damage and save lives. Most importantly, they are currently working alongside officials from the Venezuelan regime — who specifically asked the Israelis to extend their stay — to build a long-term plan for the reconstruction of the country. Politics and 19 years of frozen diplomacy completely vanished the second that lives were on the line, proving that when disaster strikes, pikuach nefesh — the Jewish principle that saving a life supersedes anything else — is upheld. It was a living embodiment of tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world. Israel showed up not to make a political point or to show off but simply because preserving human life transcends any diplomatic divide.
Now, about two months after the twin earthquakes, you barely see anything about Venezuela in the news anymore. The news cycle moves on to the next headline but for people back home, the crisis is still happening every single day. There are thousands of people living in temporary tents or shelters because their houses were completely destroyed or marked red — unsafe to enter. Hospitals are not equipped for this massive wave of injured people while dealing with damaged facilities and infrastructure and broken equipment. Engineers who have inspected the damage say that full reconstruction won’t happen in just a few months; it could easily take years or even a decade to rebuild what was lost.
Rebuilding Venezuela is going to be a long process.
This isn’t just a statistic on a screen or a brief news clip. It’s a massive humanitarian emergency affecting real families who need long-term support.
The earthquakes only lasted 39 seconds, but the impact is going to last for years. The people back home have shown incredible strength by helping each other during the worst moment of their lives, and the least we can do here is make sure we don’t look away now that the initial dust has settled.
Photo Credit: Unsplash