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This paper centers on the challenge that fundamentalist groups -such as the Israeli ultra-Orthodox community (the Haredim) -pose for citizenship. It focuses on two issues: challenges centering on contribution to and sacrifice for the Israeli nation-state; and alternatives that fundamentalism poses to definitions of citizenship. Empirically, it is based on research in three arenas: service in the Israeli military; a voluntary organization aiding state agencies after terror attacks (ZAKA), and a charitable association offering help in health and social welfare (Yad Sarah). Two trendschallenges to concepts of security and the state, and the weakening of the state in the economic sphere and social services -have opened up spaces for fundamentalist groups to operate in civil society and complement the state. The Haredi community has gradually developed a new concept of inclusion that both fits the state-centred view of citizenship and their own fundamentalist perspective.

Anthropologists dealing with death have pointed to a process of privatization, bureaucratization, and secularization of death in the age of 'high modernity'. In this article I argue that the exploration of death within the framework of modern terrorism, a form of death that is becoming increasingly common, reveals new expressions and interpretations of death that are public and are represented by a complex religious repertoire of images and practices. Based on a field study that combines in-depth interviews, observations, films, and textual analyses, this article examines how volunteers from the 'Zaka' organization (the Jewish ultra-Orthodox team for identification of victims of disaster in Israel) explain their deathwork during terror attacks. Generally we would expect that this community's religious norms, which prevent them from involvement with the larger society, would also prevent members from participation in cases of death in the public sphere. Nevertheless, Zaka's tasks involve collecting, matching, and recomposing pieces of human flesh and blood in the public arena. Through these new practices, Zaka volunteers shape new narratives of public death, which are based on two central premises: a discourse of 'corpse symbolism' and a narrative of taboo desecration. This language reinforces and revives Haredis' own religious expressions during terror, allowing them to monopolize the death experience and the handling of dead bodies, introduce sacred meanings of corpses and death into the public sphere, and create their new position as specialists and deathworkers. Testimonies of terror: prologueOn 4 October 2003, 29-year-old Hanadi Taysir Jaradat, a Palestinian attorney and new member of the Islamic Jihad, entered 'Maxim' , a well-known restaurant in Haifa, and blew herself up. Nineteen people were killed that day, and over fifty were wounded. In a letter she left to her family, she wrote:

Terror attacks are forms of social and cultural disasters that cause extensive harm to humans and the social order. Yet despite the sudden chaos they wreak and their prevalence during the last decade or so, most societies have only recently created organizational forms that can manage and handle their threatening potential. This article analyzes the relations between terror attacks and the emergence of new organizations specializing in death and disaster. We explore this issue through the case of ZAKA, the Ultra-Orthodox Identification Teams for Victims of Disasters in Israel. This organization sheds light on how in highly complex and bureaucratized countries new types of specialists in death by terror developed. From an anthropological point of view, organizational specialists in death by terror are expected to act proficiently on the basis of existing cultural norms and principles. Such organizational bodies are not only expressions of social responses to the unexpected disorder produced by terror but are also powerful cultural agents that produce new meanings. Concretely, not all organizations gain trust and support from the general public to allow its members to touch, treat and recompose the bodies of the dead, we contend that ZAKA legitimizes its goals and actions through the amalgamation of three unique elements: (a) Given that ZAKA's practices are grounded in Jewish traditions concerning death and burial, the organization use these cultural roots to gain acceptance of treating victims of terror attacks. In this way, the actions of ZAKA volunteers are legitimized since they fulfill central religious (Talmudic) duties concerning death and the treatment of corpses. (b) The organization mixes practices and knowledge from different institutions and bodies such as the police, military or medical organizations. Moreover, ZAKA cooperates with various state organizations that specialize in death events and disasters. This combination not only reinforces the legitimacy of their actions but turns them into social experts for dealing with the victims of terror and mass death. (c) During a terror event the organization deals not only with death but also with aid to, and treatment of, the injured. By giving them social permission to treat, touch and recompose the human flesh, society also sanctions them to touch the very basis of social order: treating the human body and dealing with questions of life and death in the public sphere. We end by offering a number of thoughts about the wider implications of our case study.

Religious communities have ongoing concerns about Internet use, as it intensifies the clash between tradition and modernity, a clash often found in traditionally inclined societies. Nevertheless, as websites become more useful and widely accessible, religious and communal stakeholders have continuously worked at building and promoting them. This study focuses on Chabad, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox movement, and follows webmasters of three key websites to uncover how they distribute religious knowledge over the Internet. Through an ethnographic approach that included interviews with over 30 webmasters, discussions with key informants, and observations of the websites themselves, the study uncovered webmaster’s strategies to foster solidarity within their community, on one hand, while also proselytizing their outlook on Judaism, on the other. Hence, the study sheds light on how a fundamentalist society has strengthened its association with new media, thus facilitating negotiation between modernity and religious piety.