Adam Or of the Ayalim organization, who was in Morocco at the time of the Friday night earthquake, spoke Sunday morning to 103 FM Radio, describing the enormous tragedy.
"This is the eighth year in which we have a delegation of our student village managers," he explained. "This is an organization of settlements in the Negev and Galilee, of students. This year we took a very large delegation, and the earthquake caught us exactly as we walked out of the synagogue at the end of the Sabbath meal. I myself led our line, we were about 50 people, which was a pretty long line. And just at the beginning, because we are Israelis, it really felt like a terror attack - you start to hear noise and chaos."
"Just after a few seconds everything began to start moving and shifting, it was a kind of market in the street, so a lot of things fell from the shelves. Many people began running to a large square and we ran with them. And then right in front of our eyes, balconies were falling, homes were beginning to collapse. The exit from the market is like a small alleyway, so a huge cloud of dust came out, and then things that seemed like ghosts began to come out of there, before we understood that it was people covered in dust, with blood, and children on the children, just enormous bedlam."
Or continued, "We looked for the group and we understood who was there and who wasn't there. Unfortunately we are used to it and within 20 minutes we found all of the members of the group and started to help other people. The local cellphone network fell, but most of us were on a virtual sim and it continued to work, we were lucky and immediately began dividing the group up between ourselves, we understood who is with who, unfortunately some members of the group were in the area which was hit relatively severely and they needed help getting out, and they in the end managed to get out on their own."
"A great many were injured by the panic and the rush outside, there is a small exit from this market and people trampled each other out of panic, but people also fell on them in blocks, it's a very old city. It's not meant to handle such great magnitudes, and people just collapsed on top of each other, and people were injured.
"Some of us will return already today," he told 103 FM. "We traveled to a delegation of Jewish identity and deepening our familiarity with Moroccan Judaism. We come to Morocco once a year in order to fix up the cemeteries of our Jewish communities. We are in contact with the Foreign Ministry to examine whether we will really be able to do this. We offered ourselves in the rehabilitation as well. We understood that the Moroccan leadership is less interested in foreign help at the moment. But we are very willing to help."