A group of Orthodox Jews have taken on the gruesome task of finding body parts at suicide bombing scenes. Why? Nuala Haughey reports from Jerusalem

You see them at the scene of every suicide bomb attack in Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jewish volunteers who painstakingly comb the detritus, collecting every last charred fragment of human flesh and sponging up the final stains of blood.

Often they cut incongruous figures, with their traditional sombre clothing, full beards, black felt skullcaps and side ringlets anachronistically teamed up with their trademark Day-Glo yellow vests, bleepers, walkie-talkies and disposable gloves.

Members of this religious rapid-reaction group volunteer to work in the midst of disturbing scenes of human carnage, the likes of which most of us hope never to witness. They do so because their faith dictates that it is their sacred duty to ensure all remains of the dead are respected and offered "last honours" as well as a proper and speedy Jewish burial.

Such chesed shel emet, or acts of true kindness or true mercy, are considered a religious duty in Judaism, explains Talia Zaks, the deputy director general of the organisation called Zaka, a Hebrew acronym for "identification of victims of disaster". "The volunteers make sure that the person is buried in total and with all respect, and not having a piece of his flesh being thrown somewhere and eaten by dogs or any such thing. For the families of the dead it's very important that they have a grave that they can come to and that they know their relatives were treated with respect," she says.

Over the past 10 years Zaka has evolved from being an ad-hoc group of well-intentioned amateurs to a well-equipped and trained 950-member organisation whose grisly expertise was called upon in the wake of the recent attacks on Turkish synagogues and on the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001.

The turning point for the organisation came on August 21st, 1995, after a bus bomb in Jerusalem. The volunteers turned up at the scene, as they had been doing for some six years, and gathered up body parts to be assembled at the city morgue. By evening, it was apparent that one limb was missing. That night, a volunteer turned up with the limb in the boot of his car; he had been rushing around all day with his work and didn't have time to bring it to the forensics laboratory.

"It was after that bombing that the police told us you have to be organised," explains Brooklyn-born Yossi Landau, a Hasidic Jew and commander of one of Zaka's six regional divisions.

Today, Zaka's volunteers undergo a minimum three-month training course, as well as refresher courses on how to handle body parts and identify them for burial according to halakhah, Jewish religious law. Until a person's body is identified, their surviving spouse cannot remarry. The volunteers are also offered counselling to deal with the toll their work takes on them.

The organisation, which relies entirely on donations, has also expanded its work to include emergency medical aid for any disaster, as well as search and rescue and locating missing persons. It has a fleet of 24 ambulances and almost 100 motorcycles. The men keep near the vehicles at all times, and this means they often arrive on the scene before the state's ambulance services.

Landau, a hyperactive self-employed businessman, is known by his Zaka colleagues as Yossi On the Spot because of his diligence in attending bomb scenes.

A former New York ambulance volunteer, the fatherof eight whose native tongue is Yiddish says he takes comfort from the life-saving part of his volunteer work, and is committed in his religious belief in the sanctity of human flesh and blood.

"When we come to the scene of a car accident or explosion, the first thing we do is we come as a life saver and try to save the people. When we are finished that, there is nothing more we can do, we collect the body parts. And even then we are not finished. We go to the families and inform them what happened to the loved ones and that's the hardest part you can face. Sometimes you get attacked by the families."

The last suicide bomb Landau attended was on January 29th, in the Rehavia district of Jerusalem when 11 people were killed in a powerful bus explosion near the home of the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

The explosion was so forceful that part of the vehicle's roof was blasted high up into the air, while body parts were scattered into nearby houses and gardens. Four days later, a resident contacted Zaka to say she had returned to her home after an absence and discovered body parts in it.

Landau says when he returns home from a bomb he drinks a glass of whiskey, smokes a cigarette and goes to sleep.

"I try to forget everything from the scene. You put it aside, separate your feelings from work," he says, in between frequent interruptions from his three mobile phones and two bleepers.

The retrieved body parts which are identified are given to families, while the unidentified remains are buried collectively in a common grave according to full Jewish ritual. Inevitably, parts of the body of the suicide bomber will be buried along with the victims.

"That's one of the hardest things that our volunteers are going through is that the terrorist attacker is getting buried together with innocent people," says Landau. "It's a very hard feeling to go through that. You know this bastard killed so many innocent people and you have to handle it."

While Zaka is formally open to Arabs and Jews, secular or religious, in practice its volunteers are largely members of the ultra-orthodox Haredi, deeply conservative Jews who see it as their duty to have large families, shun television and the Internet and strictly observe the Sabbath injunction not to work or use machinery. Only married men are allowed to join, as they are seen as more rounded individuals. The wives of the volunteers also help out by hosting bereaved families and have set up their own support group called Zaka Wives.

Landau says that while religious conviction is what drives many volunteers, they do not dedicate themselves only to handling the corpses of Jews. "We handle a lot of non-Jews. We don't even look if it's a Jew or a non-Jew. We know that if you don't respect the dead people you don't respect the living people." The work of the ultra-orthodox Jews in Zaka has lent them not only kudos within their own communities but improved relations between them and mainstream secular Israeli society, which have traditionally been mutually strained.

"A lot of anti-ultra-orthodox feeling is dissipated every time people see them," says one secular Jerusalem policeman.

"They do a function that nobody else would want to do. It's not just that they collect body parts. A lot of the people who work for them are medics. Very often when we are called to a traffic accident they are there before the ambulance and they are ready to give first aid. I think they are greatly appreciated for that by people who would normally be quite down on the ultra-orthodox." Later this month, Zaka plans to take the wreckage of the number 19 bus, which blew up in Rehavia, to the Hague to coincide with the hearing in the International Court of Justice against the controversial fence which Israel is building deep into the occupied Palestinian West Bank, with the aim of deterring attackers.

Zaka insists the plan is not a political act.

"We are a humanitarian organisation and the Zaka volunteers who see the death and feel it with their two hands are just going to shout out loud against terror and say the children are entitled to return home like children all over the world. And also, it's a worldwide shout against terrorism all over the world. They are just shouting out 'Stop it'."