There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the mother of 19-year-old Naama Levy, whose kidnapping that morning was filmed by Hamas. The sight of her pajama bottoms, drenched in blood at the back, was one of the earliest indications that sexual brutality was part of Hamas’ playbook.

“They’re grabbing her by the hair, and she’s all, like, messed up, and like, and I’m thinking of her hair, and like, in my mind, I’m stroking her hair, like I’m always doing,” Levy Sachar said of the video of her daughter’s kidnapping. “We would like to think that this couldn’t be possible — that nobody would harm a young girl. But then you just see it there.”

To have a child seized, savaged and paraded this way goes beyond a parent’s worst nightmare. Here it is compounded by an additional horror: the combination of indifference and outright denial with which much of the world has treated these sexual atrocities.

Why? “People are so polarized that they want every fact to fit into a narrative, and if their narrative is resistance, then sexual violence doesn’t fit into that narrative,” Sandberg said when I met her in New York last Thursday, hours before the documentary’s premiere at The Times Center. “You can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel has no choice; you can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel wants to kill babies. You can hold either one of those thoughts. And you should also be able to hold the thought that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what.”

To watch “Screams Before Silence” is to be disabused of any lingering doubts about what Hamas did.

The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence Sandberg was shown of mutilated corpses. And some of them have scarcely been heard about outside Israel.

There is Tali Binner, a partygoer at the Nova music festival who hid in a small camper as other women were raped outside: “I heard a girl that started to yell for a long time. It was like, ‘Please don’t. No, no, stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. No. No. No. It was like, she was asking someone to stop. What can they stop? Someone is abusing her. Someone touching her. Someone is doing something.”

There is Raz Cohen, who witnessed a rape as he hid with a friend in the brush: “Shoham, who was next to me, said, ‘He’s stabbing her. He’s slaughtering her,’ or something like that, and I didn’t want to look.” Cohen added, in Hebrew, “When I looked again, she was already dead, and he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered her.”

There is Rami Davidian, an emergency medical worker at the Nova site: “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. Someone murdered them, raped them and abused them, here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here.”

There is Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped to the Gaza Strip for 55 days and raped by her captor when she was trying to bathe: “He came toward me and just pointed a gun really hard at my forehead, screaming at me, ‘Take it off. Take it off,’ and punching me until I could not hold the towel anymore. And he started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom. And then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him.”

Just to transcribe these quotations is awful. It may also seem gratuitous. But the refusal by so many people to acknowledge what happened, often accompanied by sneering derision, makes it necessary.

It also illustrates some important points about the rapes and mutilations.

One is that the sexual violence appears to have been by design. Terrorists engaged in gigantic killing sprees usually don’t have time to strip and rape their victims. Morgues don’t typically find body after body arriving with bloodied underpants, butchered breasts, mutilated groins. On Oct. 7 and the days that followed, they did, and not just in a few isolated incidents. How did so many of the killers get the same idea?

Another is that the primary purpose of the rapes was not sexual gratification. It was humiliation and terror. “When the body of the woman is violated, it symbolizes the body of the whole nation,” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a former vice president of the U.N. Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, observed to Sandberg. And what better way to terrify an enemy than through forms of sexual violence that make the rape scene in “A Clockwork Orange” seem tame by comparison?

A third point that goes beyond Israel: Sexual violence has always been a tool of war. But widespread awareness of it, along with an international determination to stop it, really started only in the 1990s with the horrors in the Balkans and Congo. The giant shrug with which the rape of Israeli women is being met suggests that time may be over. What starts with the Jews, as the saying goes, never ends with the Jews.

Which raises a final point.

“I’ve spent my life, obviously, building businesses,” Sandberg said toward the end of our interview. “And separately, I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting for women. And I never thought I was going to work on antisemitism. I didn’t think it was a problem, and I was absolutely wrong. And I never thought that politics could make any group or feminist leader turn a blind eye to just such clear documentation of sexual violence.”

With “Screams Before Silence,” Sandberg has screamed back at the silence. Is anybody listening?

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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The staff who handle 911 calls throughout St. Paul and Ramsey County returned to their remodeled center this week, with embedded social workers now stationed in the middle of the room.

Some mental health-related calls were already being transferred to people with expertise in the field, but their new spot in the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center (known as the ECC), will allow them to communicate more easily with all staff, officials said.

The ECC opened in 2007 and the center has had some updates since then, though not as extensive a makeover as the latest project, which was budgeted at $1.8 million and just completed. Since people work there 24-7, 365 days a year, the center has seen a lot of wear and tear, said Nancie Pass, Ramsey County Emergency Communications director.

“Some of the consoles were actually breaking down, and we couldn’t find parts for them anymore,” Pass said.

The changes also take into account how the work at the ECC happens. Work stations were rearranged to allow for better communication — for example, the law enforcement dispatchers used to sit in a row and now they’re arranged in a circle “so they’re able to communicate better with each other and not over the desks like they used to have to do,” Pass said.

Public Safety dispatcher Sasha Quandt, front, keeps an eye on police traffic in the remodeled Ramsey County Emergency Communication Center in St. Paul on Wednesday, May 1, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Looking at non-traditional responses to 911 calls

Ramsey County formally started its Appropriate Responses Initiative in 2022, which is looking at 911 calls “and how we could create different and new responses to be able to more appropriately meet the needs of people who are calling,” said Jenn Hamrick, the county’s integrated health and justice administrator.

“It’s really being able to think about how we can respond to people having a mental health crisis and 911 callers differently,” beyond a traditional police, fire or emergency medical services response, Hamrick said.

The process of transferring some calls to Ramsey County Crisis began in 2016, though the mental health professionals weren’t located in the ECC at that time. When the embedded social workers were added to the ECC, they were tucked into a corner where space was available. With their new location in the center of the room, they’ll be able to better collaborate with 911 calltakers and dispatchers, Pass said.

“It’s almost a symbolism that happened in an unplanned way — we centered community wellness by centering mental health in the Emergency Communications Center,” said Jessica Kisling, Ramsey County Crisis Services manager.

Four embedded social workers have been assigned to the Ramsey County ECC since 2022.

When there’s a 911 or non-emergency call to the center that is mental-health or substance-use related, those calls are transferred to an embedded social worker if it isn’t a criminal matter or someone who needs immediate medical care.

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“Their role really is to triage and make some decisions about the best response type,” said Ashley Sporer, embedded social work supervisor. They’ve found that the primary need is information about resources, which the social workers can provide during the phone call.

The people calling have a variety of needs. Some are well-known to the social workers, and call multiple times a day or an hour. “They don’t feel like they have anywhere else to call, so we talk to them over the phone and provide them with therapeutic resources and try to connect them with the resources they already have,” Sporer said.

Another example is a parent calling about their adult child who has a mental health condition, isn’t taking their prescription medication or going to appointments. They ask, “Could somebody please go out and knock on his door and see if they can engage him in a different way?” which is a situation in which they’d dispatch Ramsey County Crisis, who are mental health professionals and practitioners, to help in person, Sporer said.

Public Health responders

Public Safety dispatcher Jessica Schendel monitors parts of St. Paul at the remodeled Ramsey County Emergency Communication Center, which handles 911 calls throughout St. Paul and Ramsey County. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

In a pilot program started in February, there are now three St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health responders who can be dispatched by the ECC to calls involving substance use — that aren’t overdoses or medical emergencies — in New Brighton, Mounds View and Maplewood; they’re due to start in Shoreview on Monday and the county is working with other cities to expand their work.

Examples of types of calls they might respond to are people seeking detoxification services for themselves or others or people looking for help for a loved one with a substance use problem and they “don’t know what else to do or where to call,” Sporer said.

Since mental health and substance use can be intertwined, the embedded social workers can also dispatch a Public Health responder to “meet people where they are and provide them with the resources they need,” Hamrick said.

The ECC received 380,204 calls to 911 last year and 362,926 calls to non-emergency numbers.

Between January 2023 and the end of March 2024, just under 3,000 of the calls were transferred to one of the embedded social workers or to Ramsey County Crisis to work directly with the caller. The number is increasing: this year alone, more than 1,000 calls have been transferred to a social worker to handle.

Sporer attributes the increase to having enough embedded social workers on board to consistently be available for calls and to building trust and relationships with telecommunicators so they feel comfortable transferring calls to them.

Ramsey County is also in the process of looking for a community organization to run a community responder program, which will be another option to dispatch, and the goal is to have a pilot program running by the end of the year, Hamrick said.

17 years since center opened

Ramsey County Emergency Communications shift supervisor Lisa Cardinal at her desk in the remodeled Ramsey County Emergency Communication Center. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

When the Ramsey County ECC opened 17 years ago, it merged 911 centers that had been at the historic Public Safety Building in downtown St. Paul, in Maplewood and in Shoreview. Since then, White Bear Lake has also come on board and the Ramsey County ECC now sends information to Allina Health EMS for ambulance responses and dispatches for the Minnesota State Fair when it’s underway. The ECC is responsible for 20 police and fire agencies.

The center is still a two-stage operation: Telecommunicators answer all 911 and non-emergency calls and electronically transmit information in real time to dispatchers who send police, fire or EMS responders to the call.

The remodel began in January, and all 911 calls and dispatching was handled from the county’s back-up 911 center in Arden Hills. They started moving back to their St. Paul center on Tuesday and plan to wrap up the move on Friday.

With so many people taking calls and dispatching, the center can get noisy. And with ECC staffers working 12-hour shifts, there’s a need for “calming factors” in their workspace, including lighting and minimizing the noise, Pass said.

The remodeled walls have acoustic panels and the colors are a cascading effect. The new ceiling tiles are designed to absorb 90 percent of the noise, Pass said. The carpet was torn out and now there’s soundproof, hard-surfaced rubber flooring that’s easier to clean.

The decisions about flooring, workstations and color schemes were made by employees in surveys, Pass said.

If you need to call 911 anywhere in Minnesota

Tips from the Ramsey County Emergency Communications Center and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Emergency Communication Networks division:

Unless you’re deaf, hard of hearing, speech impaired, or in specific emergencies, calling 911 should always be your first option (an easy way to remember this is “Call if you can, text if you can’t”).
Callers should be prepared to give nearby intersections and specific landmarks if they don’t know the exact address, even if calling from a cell phone.
People are asked to stay on the line until they’ve answered all the 911 public safety telecommunicator’s questions.
Anyone using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) devices should ensure their service provider has an accurate physical address, so an emergency call is directed to the right public safety answering point location.

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To his high school teachers, he’s Frank Kamish.

But to his YouTube subscribers, the Minneapolis junior is FHK.

And Kamish, 18 as of this April, is hoping a recent stunt to create what he bills as the world’s longest French fry will cement his status as YouTube’s “fry guy.”

He runs two YouTube channels: one dedicated to challenge-style videos like this one, and another full of quick-hit reviews of French fries from restaurants around the country. His main FHK channel sits at about 1,900 subscribers as of now, with eight full-length videos.

The giant fry Kamish made for the video was 12 feet long and, to be fair, perhaps closer to a potato dumpling log or a gnocchi loaf. The creation was made from a dough of instant mashed potato, flour and water — a recipe he landed on after chatting with chef Tommy Begnaud of Mr. Paul’s Supper Club in Edina — and packed into a gutter he bought from a hardware store.

Kamish par-cooked the fry in boiling water and then, instead of deep-frying it, slathered butter and oil on the exterior and blowtorched it, a process he said was largely due to safety concerns and logistical challenges.

Was it delicious? Not really, Kamish admitted. But the freedom to play around is part of why he hopes to hit it big on YouTube, he said.

“In this early stage, it’s just a big experiment on what I’m going to do,” he said, over a basket of crinkle fries at Saint Dinette, in Lowertown. (His rating: 8.2 out of 10; well-salted, but he prefers straight-cut fries with a deeper golden-brown crust, as opposed to the fluffier kind here.)

“What is my style, is the biggest thing right now.”

One thing is for sure: It involves fries.

A couple years ago, Kamish’s friend moved to Colorado and met YouTuber Matthew Beem, who has 5.5 million subscribers, and connected Kamish with him.

Early in Beem’s own YouTube career, to establish himself with a splash, he created a custom car to surprise Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, the platform’s biggest individual creator.

The FHK version of the gambit — building Beem a giant Coca-Cola soda fountain and surprise-delivering it, in summer 2022 — sits at 25,000 views as of April 2024.

At a YouTube creators’ conference about a year ago, Beem and Kamish ran into each other again. The rising star remembered the high schooler’s penchant for French fries, and issued him a challenge: Make a giant fry.

Kamish flew to Denver to construct the fry there, so as to involve Beem in the result.

“This is actually the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” Beem said in the video.

The world’s reigning largest fry — also technically a “molded potato chip,” per the experts at Guinness World Records, who certified it — was created in 2018 in India and clocked in at about 10.3 feet long. Kamish didn’t involve Guinness in his attempt; earning the certificate generally entails arduous paperwork and monthslong bureaucratic delays.

Kamish isn’t making money from YouTube right now; that’s certainly the goal, said his father, Paul Kamish, a caricaturist and fine art business owner, but he said the high schooler is learning valuable lessons in camera presence, video and sound editing and building a brand.

“The biggest thing that I need to implement is consistency,” Frank Kamish said. “That’s the only way I’m going to get to my milestone of being one of the biggest entertainers in the world.”

You can follow Frank Kamish at youtube.com/@ItsFHK.

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