By Rabbi Baruch Lederman
The bombing at Sbarro’s restaurant is a distant memory to most people. Not so to the Lavie family. Mrs. Lavie and her four children were all wounded in the August 2001 bombing.
Far worse than the physical injuries they sustained, however, are the emotional scars that linger in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, behavioral problems, and ever-present fear.
The Lavie children desperately need various types of therapy. But the family has no car, and, understandably, the children refuse to take buses. They are also afraid to travel with
strangers, so taxis are out of the question. So Mrs. Lavie turned to Ezer Mizion for help.
Merav, coordinator of volunteer drivers at Ezer Mizion Jerusalem, paired the Lavies with Shai, a volunteer who agreed to drive the children to their appointments once a week. The Lavies are a religious family, and Shai is completely secular. Nevertheless, Shai and the Lavies developed very close ties. Each week, Shai would buy something for the children before he came to pick them up.
“Shai is like a psychologist to my children,” Mrs. Lavie told Merav. “Since the attack, my son David has a problem with his memory. Shai said to him one day, ‘I also have trouble remembering things. Let’s think of techniques we can use to overcome this problem.’ And they did. Now, my children actually began to look forward to the weekly trip that they had so dreaded previously.”
Yishai, another Ezer Mizion ambulance driver, was driving one day in Jerusalem’s Beit Hakerem neighborhood when he noticed an Ezer Mizion ambulance parked in front of a falafel store. Wondering what the ambulance was doing there, Yishai slowed down and saw David, the driver of the parked ambulance. “You came all the way to Beit Hakerem to buy falafel?” Yishai teased David.
“Actually, it’s not for me,” David answered. “A few days ago, I took a girl to the Alyn Pediatric Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. This girl had undergone surgery to remove a brain
tumor, and was going to Alyn for therapy. While she was in my ambulance, I overheard her talking to her friend on a cell phone. She told her friend that she used to love buying
falafel at the Shevach falafel store in Beit Hakerem, and now she can’t go there anymore because of her illness.
“Today, I’m taking this girl to Alyn again,” David continued. “So I figured, why not make her happy and buy her falafel at Shevach?”
Ezer Mizion was founded by Chanaya Chollak, who experienced first-hand the many difficulties that patients and their families encounter during the physically and emotionally demanding time when a relative of his became seriously ill.
Chollak decided that something had to be done. In 1979, he founded Ezer Mizion (“Help from Zion”), a non-sectarian, non-profit organization that would be dedicated to assisting
Israel’s sick, elderly and handicapped. Initiated in 1979 with 8 volunteers, Ezer Mizion now operates out of dozens of cities in Israel with 10,000 volunteers and benefits close to half
a million people every year.
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Rabbi Lederman is spiritual leader of Congregation Kehillas Torah in San Diego