Schechter News | In the Media

I call heaven and earth to witness for you this day; I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your offspring shall live. Deut. 30:19

Living in Jerusalem is usually a great blessing, but every so often there are great challenges thrown at us. There exists true holiness, and at the same time the most dreadful destruction that I could or would ever want to imagine.

In the span of about 48 hours I went through everything that this amazing country has to offer. As I am living and studying in Israel this year I felt it necessary to give something back to this amazing country and to the people who have made this land their home. I am serving as a volunteer medic on an ambulance once a week with Magen David Adom (MADA- the Emergency Medical Services here in Israel), and through it I have had some incredible insights into Israel and the people that live here.

Shalom Kantor at Magen David Adom station in Jerusalem.

Amazingly, about 80% of the emergency medical services in this entire country are provided by volunteers. Many people, ranging from doctors to school teachers, offer one shift a week or a month to help out. I thought that it would be a great opportunity for me to give something back as well.

Through a program run jointly with the Jewish Agency and MADA, foreign volunteers can come to Israel and go through training in Basic Emergency Medicine. We are then set up to work with an ambulance station at different locations through out the country. It is an amazing program that can be done on its own for two or three months, or, as I am doing it, as part of a year long study program.

My normal weekly shift begins at the main Jerusalem Ambulance station every Thursday at 7:00 AM where I am assigned to an ambulance for the day. In the past, the majority of calls have involved taking elderly people, the "help, I've fallen and I can't get up" type, to the hospital.

But Thursday, January 29th was a whole different story…

I arrived at the Magen David Adom station at 6:45 as I do every Thursday. There was the usual morning shuffle of figuring out who is going to work with whom, and the changing of the shift. As members of the tired night shift grab their personal bags out of the ambulances, we the new shift check over all of the equipment and re-supply the ambulances for a new day.

My first call was at about 7:30 when a man fell from a four- meter ladder. When we arrived at the scene, we were led to a garage where we found the man, lying on his back… We immobilized the man, took him to the hospital trauma unit, and made our way back to the base to finish restocking the ambulance and wash it from the previous night’s rain.

Usually when there is a call to go out to a certain destination, the dispatcher comes on the loud speaker at the base and says, Driver X, to your ambulance. If you are working with driver X, that is your cue to go to the ambulance.

We were just getting ready to wash the ambulance, (for all I know we may have even left the water running) when at 9:02 a loud siren went off at the base. The dispatcher came on the loud speaker and said, “Autobus hitpotzetz b’ Rechov Aza, kulam l’ ambulancim - A bus has blown up on Aza Street, everyone to their ambulances - Autobus hitpotzetz b’ Rechov Aza, kulam l ‘ambulancim!”

With a combination of the efficiency of a country that has done this many times before, and still retaining a little of the chaos of New Years Eve in Time Square, everyone went to their ambulances. Each screamed out of the parking lot, one at a time reporting back to the dispatcher, Ambulance #66, on its way.

At 9:00 a.m. a Palestinian terrorist blew himself up and eleven innocent civilians with him on the #19 bus in the residential neighborhood of Rehavia in Jerusalem. At 9:02 the alarm went off at the Ambulance Station, and by 9:12, I was in the third ambulance on the scene of a living hell on earth. What I saw, heard and smelled cannot be described in any words that exist in any human language. Nor do I want to recall or describe what I experienced as I attempted to save lives and tend to the wounded.

With out going into details, let me say that on Thursday, the 29th of January, I took part in life saving measures for several casualties of this tragic incident. Even though I was the third ambulance to arrive on the scene, there were already 15 or more MADA personnel there. The amazing system of “instant response” allows the State of Israel to deal with whatever threat to life is brought upon the country.

After getting out of the Ambulance with bullet proof vests on, in case there might have been a secondary bomb intended to kill the medical personnel, we began to care for the worst of the victims. Within a few minutes of our arrival, we loaded two victims into our ambulance and sped away to get them to the hospital.

For better or for worse, the hospitals in Israel, and especially in Jerusalem, are very well equipped for this type of crisis. First, I should note, even though we were speeding into the hospital with our lights blaring we had to stop at the security check point to make sure that we were actually not another terrorist attempting to take advantage of the situation and blow up the hospital!

The ambulance unloading area was like nothing I had ever seen. Normally, when we pull in to unload a patient, no one is there waiting for us. We pull in and park, and then unload the patient and bring them into the ER. When we pulled in this time, there was a row of beds lined up outside. Around each bed was a full operating team including several doctors, already in scrubs, and nurses prepared for any eventuality.

They did not know what would come out of each ambulance, yet no matter, they were ready to do anything to save lives ... Before we could even get out of the ambulance to unload the patients, the hospital crews had already unloaded the wounded, closed our doors, while telling us to pull out so there would be room for the next ambulance. They did this with the efficiency of a country that had rehearsed this routine over and over. While it is a beautiful thing to know that there was such a desire to save lives, it is also sad that in this country’s short history, her citizens have become such experts at this.

Judaism is a religion of life. What I witnessed that day, both at the site of the bombing, and throughout the aftermath is a true testimony to the strong desire to live, succeed, and defeat those who want to annihilate us.

After dropping off our first set of patients at the hospital, the weight of what happened hit me. I needed to be with my friends. I spent the rest of the day taking care of myself, or at least letting friends take care of me. Later I went to a debriefing about the bombing at the MADA headquarters. Knowing that it would not be good to stay alone in my apartment, I asked close friends if I could stay with them for Thursday and Friday nights.

These friends were expecting twins in the next few weeks. As I was finally falling asleep after a nice Shabbat dinner, at about 1:30 AM, my friend knocked on my door and said, “Shalom, It s time, the twins are coming .”

I immediately thought of my co-workers at MADA. Whenever a MADA team helps with a birth, even by transporting the mother, the talk is rather joyful at the station, as it is rare to get a positive call in an ambulance. So, even though my friends started to call a cab, I knew that both for their health and safety, and the spiritual morale of the MADA crew, calling an ambulance was the right move.

I sent my friends to the hospital and realized that I was alone. Considering everything that had happened in the last two days, I didn’t want to be alone. So, at 1:30 AM I woke up my friend Mark. We decided that Judaism was definitely about living, and we would be darned if there were going to be new life with out us present, giving our support to our friends, “The New Parents.” Since it was Shabbat and we could not take a car, Mark and I set off at 2:00 am, Talmud and Tallit in hand, to walk across Jerusalem from Rehavia to Hadassah Ein Kerem.

New life at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.

We arrived at the hospital at 4:30 AM to find our friends in the surgical recovery room, after an emergency C-Section. They are the proud new parents of two beautiful baby boys.

Sitting and watching my friend as she held her newborn child, it began to dawn on me what had happened to me in the previous sixty hours- from seeing total death and destruction, to witnessing the absolute miracle of new life.

Just when we were getting up to leave, a voice announced over the loudspeaker, “All mothers who have not yet heard Havdalah, please proceed to the Nurses station.” It was then that I knew I was a part of an amazing people, who indeed, when given a choice, choose life..time and again.

SHALOM KANTOR
"It is not your job to finish the task, but neither may you desist"
Rabbi. Tarfon- Pirkei Avot 2:21