Chavivim members from KJ, Rockland, Catskills, Ocean County, Boro Park, and Williamsburg staged together in a Catskills clearing with the SAR ATV and KJ-500 Command Center

May 17, 2026 · Search & Rescue

Chavivim SAR Trains Across Divisions in the Catskills Ahead of Summer

As the summer season approaches, Chavivim Search & Rescue led an intense training today in the Catskill Mountains for Chavivim members, focusing on search operations in bungalow colonies, structures, and wooded terrain.

Building a Wider Bench Before the Season

When a real search call comes in, time is the enemy. The minutes spent waiting for a full crew of NYSDEC-certified technicians to assemble can be the difference between a clean find and a search that drags into the dark.

That's why today's training wasn't just for SAR-certified members and EMTs. Volunteers from across the Chavivim network turned out — Orange County, Rockland, Catskills, Ocean County, Boro Park, and Williamsburg — to learn how to plug into a real search operation alongside the team's DEC-compliant technicians. Not to lead the operation, but to be useful from the first minute it starts: hold a search line, sweep a structure to standard, follow navigation calls, and trust the system the certified leaders run.

Cross-division Chavivim briefing circle in a Catskills clearing with members from KJ, Rockland, Catskills, Ocean County, Boro Park, and Williamsburg

Chavivim members gathered around a leader at the side of the KJ-500 Command Center truck for pre-mission instructions

From the Command Truck Out

Every search runs on two things at once: a brain and a reach. The brain lives inside KJ-500, the SAR command truck staged for the day — where coordinators work over mapping software, GPS, radio comms, and live position feeds across four monitors. The reach is everything that fans out from there: the SAR ATV for trails too narrow for a vehicle, the search lines moving on foot through the trees, and the radios that keep every team tied back to the desk.

Two Chavivim members with the SAR ATV staged in front of the KJ-500 Command Center truck — KJ-500 staged with the SAR ATV — command on the truck, mobility on two wheels.

Wide interior view of the KJ-500 SAR Command Center with equipment racks, monitors, mapping software, and an active command operator — Inside KJ-500 — equipment racks, mapping software, and the kind of redundancy a real SAR operation runs on.

Chavivim member on the SAR ATV staged outside a red bungalow colony building — The reach — the SAR ATV staged outside a bungalow colony, ready for terrain a truck can't take.

Three Environments. One Standard.

The Catskills doesn't give a search team one terrain — it gives you all of them at once. Today's exercise drilled three:

Bungalow colonies — tight clusters of cabins, communal spaces, and the kind of indoor-outdoor flow that hides someone behind a door, under a porch, or behind a shed if the search isn't methodical.
Structures — searching the inside of a home, a camp building, or a bunkhouse room by room, on a system that doesn't skip the closet, the basement, or the space behind the couch.
Wooded terrain — the open mountain itself, where line spacing, compass discipline, and tight team communication separate a real search from a wander.

Chavivim members in a briefing at the back of a response truck in wooded terrain

Chavivim search line moving through a clearing under power lines into the woods, holding spacing and direction

Chavivim members in single-file formation walking a wooded path during a SAR training exercise

Chavivim members pushing through dense undergrowth and brush during a wooded-terrain search drill

One Network, Many Plates

For today's exercise, members from six Chavivim divisions worked the same drills off the same playbook — Orange County, Rockland, Catskills, Ocean County, Boro Park, and Williamsburg volunteers running the same search patterns, listening to the same command channel, and answering to the same NYSDEC-certified leaders. When the real call comes, that's the muscle memory that matters: it doesn't matter which division a member belongs to. The training is the training. The standard is the standard. The team shows up.

KJ-501 fly car staged with Chavivim members at the Catskills SAR training site — KJ-501 at the training site — alongside KJ-500, the two response vehicles on the ground for the day.

Wide view of the Chavivim SAR training staging area with response and crew vehicles in a Catskills clearing

Chavivim crews regrouping for a briefing at the back of a response vehicle between training drills

Every Speck of Dust

Today's training emphasized one mission: to search every structure and every terrain thoroughly — leaving no speck of dust untouched when a life may be on the line.

That standard doesn't change with the searcher. The 110-hour NYSDEC-certified technician runs to it. The volunteer who showed up for the first training today runs to it. The certified leaders set the pattern; the wider crew follows it, exactly. And when the calls start coming — and they will, as soon as the colonies open and the camps fill — the response that rolls out will be deeper, faster, and broader than any one division could field alone.

Chavivim SAR-shirted team gathered at the back of the KJ-500 Command Center with response gear staged — Every tool checked, every load accounted for before the next sweep.

Walkthrough from today's training in the Catskill Mountains.

Field clip — the line moving in.

Ready for the Season

This is what readiness looks like at scale: not a small SAR team off on its own, but a network that grows when it has to. As summer arrives, every Chavivim member who trained today carries the same playbook into the mountains — same standard, same discipline, same answer when the call goes out.

Chavivim SAR training crew gathered in a circle around the SAR ATV at the end of the day in a Catskills clearing — Today's crew — ready for summer in the mountains.