Israeli judo star auctions Olympic uniform to fund PTSD treatment for ZAKA volunteers after Oct 7

Israeli Olympic bronze medalist Peter Paltchik is auctioning the uniform, known as a judogi, he wore while winning bronze at the 2024 Paris Olympics, to raise funds for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment for ZAKA volunteers still coping with the psychological toll of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

Paltchik announced the auction in a video reflecting on what the uniform meant to him during one of the defining moments of his career.

“When I represented our people at the Paris Olympic Games, my [judogi], this fighting suit, was my physical armor on the world's biggest stage,” Paltchik said. “It carries the sweat, the tears, and the unbreakable spirit of Israel's historic first medal of those games.”

The auction has a minimum bid of $50,000, and Paltchik said he will personally call the winning bidder to thank them. According to the ZAKA auction website, the proceeds will fund “personalized therapies, experiential workshops, family aid, crisis tools, and spiritual support – for the volunteer, and for his family.”

"Real armor doesn't just belong on the athletic mat. It belongs on the men and women of ZAKA, who wear the yellow vests to protect our national dignity in our darkest hours,” Paltchik said.

ZAKA, founded after a terrorist attack in 1989, is one of Israel's best-known private search, rescue and recovery organizations. Its volunteers are often among the first to respond to terror attacks, accidents and natural disasters.

Following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, ZAKA volunteers played a central role in search, rescue and recovery operations.

For months, they searched for the missing, recovered human remains and helped identify and bury the dead at massacre sites, including at Kibbutz Be'eri, exposing many of them to severe psychological trauma.

“For many of the volunteers, the toll doesn’t arrive as a dramatic break. It accumulates. It lives in the volunteer who looks, from the outside, like he’s handling it – and is quietly carrying more than he should carry alone,” ZAKA writes on the auction website.

The lasting impact of that work has been well documented.

ZAKA volunteers “collected hundreds of bodies from Gaza-border communities and the Nova music festival; they cleaned the blood from cars, swept up the ashes and saw things no one should have to endure,” Shomrim, the Center for Media and Democracy, wrote in a November 2024 feature examining the severe psychological toll the work has taken on the organization's volunteers.

The impact has extended well beyond the volunteers themselves, affecting their families, jobs and daily lives.

“I got a lot of phone calls from the wives and children of ZAKA volunteers, all of them asking the same thing: Give us back the father we had,” Yossi Landau, the head of operations for ZAKA's Lakhish region, told Shomrim.

Landau said employers also complained that volunteers appeared emotionally absent after returning to work, and in one case, a volunteer lost his job, further straining his family's life.

He recalled one call in particular:

“I once got a call at midnight from a boy who was 10 days away from celebrating his bar mitzvah. He told me that nothing was ready because his father was oblivious to everything going on around him. He stayed in bed, went for a walk, came back and acted like a ghost.”