Yehuda Meshi Zahav

Avraham Zvi Yehuda Meshi Zahav (Hebrew: יהודה משי זהב, Yiddish: יהודה משי זהב; 19 July 1959 – 29 June 2022) was an Israeli social activist, a member of the Haredi Jewish community, and chairman of ZAKA.

ZAKA traced its roots to a small group of religious volunteers who responded to the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem bus 405 attack on 6 July 1989 and then began organizing their ad hoc recovery and identification efforts “in a systematic manner,” which the organization’s own historical summary describes as the starting point of what later became ZAKA. Independent reporting commonly dates the formal establishment of ZAKA to 1995, in the context of volunteer activity that developed in Jerusalem in the years following the 1989 attack. Several Hebrew-language obituaries and profiles, meanwhile, attribute early “chesed shel emet” (kavod ha-met) organizing to figures other than Yehuda Meshi-Zahav: for example, accounts of Rabbi Shlomo Eisenbach describe him as among the founders of ZAKA and state that he worked together with Rabbi Menashe Eichler and Rabbi Elazar Gelbstein to form an earlier framework referred to as “Chesed Shel Emet,” which later developed into ZAKA; one obituary further states that, after years, Eisenbach established ZAKA together with Meshi-Zahav, who later became chairman.

In March 2021, it was revealed that Zahav was a prolific sex offender who had been abusing boys and girls throughout his career. Following these reports Meshi Zahav attempted to take his own life. He remained in a coma for over a year until he died on 29 June 2022.

Later investigations revealed Zahav had abused hundreds of people over decades on a nearly daily occurrence. At the same time he was carrying out financial fraud and repeated violent crimes including attempted murder. The journalist who first exposed his abuse said these crimes were facilitated by a widespread coverup that amounted to institutional complicity.