COMMUNITY NEWS
Ninety Seconds Eli Beer built the largest volunteer emergency service in the world out of two police scanners and a refusal to take no for an answer. The founder of United Hatzalah sat down with the Community Voice in Hollywood. The man was bleeding out on a Jerusalem sidewalk, and the sixteen-year-old kneeling over him had no bandage and no kit. So he took the yarmulke off his own head, stuck it into the wound in the man’s neck and put pressure on it until an ambulance came twenty minutes later. Two days later the phone rang. “Are you Eli Beer? My father woke up in Hadassah hospital this morning. He was treated by you, and you saved his life.” Beer went to visit him. The man was about seventy. He pulled Beer into a hug, and that was when Beer saw the number on his arm. “And that changed my life. That moment.” He had spent his childhood at Yad Vashem — he was thrown out of cheder in sixth grade and out of the next school a year later, and that is where he went when he ran out of school. “One person was able to influence so many people to kill Jews. Maybe somebody could influence people to save people. Do the opposite.” At nine or ten he decided that when he grew up he would save six million Jews. The broken system At almost fifteen he volunteered on a Magen David Adom ambulance and started writing
down when each call came in and when they arrived. The average was seventeen minutes. Jerusalem had nine or ten ambulances for the whole city, five overnight. He is careful to say this was normal everywhere, not an Israeli failure. “If the ambulance is stuck in traffic, they don’t have wings.” Then a seven-year-old choked on a hot dog. Beer’s crew was the only ambulance available and reached him twenty-one minutes
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after his mother called. “By the time we arrived, this kid was completely blue and cold.” They did CPR for forty-five minutes. The doctor who ran in to help turned out to live across the street. “That whole time when we were fighting traffic, he could have run across the street and saved him.” “And I said to myself, the system is broken. Ambulances are good for transport, but not good for saving people.” An ambulance is a pre-hospital service. Nobody had built a pre-ambulance service. The ambulance monopoly refused to share calls. “So I said, I’ll manage on my own. Israel is built on one very important thing — chutzpah. We don’t ask. We do.” He bought two scanners from Radio Shack and fifteen pagers, listened in on the ambulance and fire radios, and got there first. “Undercover. Everything was undercover.” The target was ninety seconds, chosen because brain damage cannot be reversed. Instead of a central station, trained volunteers Photos: United Hatzalah of Israel
COMMUNITY NEWS everywhere, each with a pager, the closest ones alerted automatically — on motorcycles so traffic couldn’t stop them. He called them ambucycles, the first in Israel. He was sixteen and a half. Opening the doors For nearly two decades Hatzalah grew only inside frum communities, with Rav Moshe Halberstam of the Eidah HaChareidis as its rav. Then, twenty years ago, missiles fell on Haifa in the Second Lebanon War. “I said, let’s build Hatzalah for everyone. For the whole klal Yisrael.” Men and women, religious and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish, Arab communities. “We can’t say we’re 90 seconds only in this neighborhood.” “A lot of people were fighting against me.” What carried it was the backing of Rav Elyashiv, Rav Ovadia Yosef, Rav Kanievsky and Rav Shteinman. The organization took a new name: United Hatzalah. “It was actually the hardest thing I ever did, but the best thing I ever did.” Today it has ten thousand volunteers and has responded to more than eight million emergencies, with its own emergency number at 1221 and a command center Beer calls “like a NASA control and command room.” Its first real donor, Mark Gerson, gave $18,000 twenty-five years ago and was made chairman on the grounds that he was the only person on the board. He still chairs it. Asked what South Florida families can do beyond writing checks, Beer points to a program started by a local family, the Leights — Leight Legacy Heroes now has three thousand children world-
wide, from age six up, who fundraise and take EMT courses as kids. His book 90 Seconds is published by ArtScroll; a third is on the way. “Hatzalah is the greatest Jewish innovation. What do they have in Lebanon? Hezbollah. We have Hatzalah saving people, no matter who it is.” October 7th Beer got up at 6:45 on Simchas Torah to word that a volunteer had been shot in Ofakim, then missiles started toward Yerushalayim. At the command center, five hundred calls were waiting.
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United Hatzalah can open a caller’s phone camera within two seconds — a capability it was first in the world to use. That is how they learned what was happening at Nova. “People thought it was car accidents.” The cameras showed cars crashing one after another; callers assumed oil on the road. It was shooting at the drivers. The gunfire in the background was hollower than an M16. Old Kalashnikovs. Then the counting. Thirty dead, another thirty, another twenty. Past a hundred they assumed they were double-counting. “They said, no, these are different areas.
COMMUNITY NEWS Ofakim, Netivot, Sderot, Kfar Aza. We realized this was an invasion. We knew before everyone that we were dealing with a war.” Volunteers came from shul in their taluses to answer phones. Asked whether the government was informing him: “They were getting updates from us. The army fell apart.” Volunteers were told to hold back and refused. Over a thousand went in under fire; three are the subject of an episode of the HBO series One Day in October. The army had closed the airspace and United Hatzalah’s two helicopters flew anyway. When the Ministry of Health called to scream, Beer phoned the prime minister’s office: “He said, do whatever you need to do to save lives.” His wife Giti was among those
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who went south. At noon a jeep brought in a severely wounded soldier. “Looking at him, it was hard to imagine that we’d be able to save him.” She noticed the wedding band on his finger. “All I could think of was that this is a married man. He has children waiting for him at home.” They intubated him under fire and got him to a helicopter. He was in a coma for months. When he walked for the first time he went to visit his son at kindergarten, and his wife sent Giti the video. At Kfar Aza that evening, soldiers found ten-month-old twins alive in their cribs, their parents killed that morning — left as bait, Beer says, crying all day so more Jews would come and could be killed too. Volunteers worked outside the gate all day. “There was
COMMUNITY NEWS no more dangerous place in the world. 300 terrorists there.” The twins are alive. Two other volunteers reached a general bleeding to death, got him into an ambulance under tourniquets, and when the hospital was too packed to take him, pulled the rank off his shoulders and ran in shouting that there was a general outside. “That general is now the head of Mossad. Roman Gofman.” “We saved hundreds of people who otherwise would have been added to the number. We’re talking about a day when 1,250 people were killed.” Had he built United Hatzalah over thirty-five years for that day alone, he says, dayenu.
What he’s fighting for now What worries Beer now is not Hamas. “We have a big machlokes in Israel. Very big hatred between religious and secular” — worse, he says, than before October 7th or during the judicial reform fight. He uses the words civil war. His answer is to let chareidi men serve through United Hatzalah: “We want to take 10,000 chareidi people.” He is otherwise almost aggressively optimistic. “There was never a better time for Jews in America than now, in the history of the Jewish people.” There is antisemitism, but there was antisemitism in Florida forty years ago; what is new is social media. “We have to be thankful to Hashem that we’re
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living in the best times the Jews ever lived in.” He was once elected head of the va’ad bayit in his building. Eleven tenants. He decided to change the light bulbs and a war broke out over yellow versus white. “So I resigned after one month, and I said, enough with politics.” Netanyahu has raised the Knesset with him twice. He is not going to run. He named his real job decades ago, as a kid at Yad Vashem doing the arithmetic on six million. “The name of the organization is Hatzalah, but we added United. And I think we need to fight for uniting the Jewish people more than ever.”