United Hatzalah founder Eli Beer cuts through traffic and red tape to save lives, and he’s bringing his Hatzalah model to the entire world

(Photos: Elchanan Kotler)

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t was the summer of 1989, and Eli, just shy of his 17th birthday, had already spent close to two years riding in the back of an ambulance as a volunteer medic for Magen David Adom. It was a time when Israelis were reeling from the trauma of the First Intifada, and were still in shock from the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem 405 bus attack, when a suicide terrorist seized the steering wheel of the packed bus and sent it careening down a cliff into a ravine outside of Telshe Stone, killing 16 and injuring 27. Eli was one of the dozens of volunteers who slid down the muddy slopes to help, but he was just a kid without any authority and there wasn’t much he could do.

And then one afternoon, there came a call from a frantic mother: Her seven-year-old son was choking on a hot dog while eating lunch. Eli was in the back of the ambulance, stuck in traffic, and by the time the crew arrived 20 minutes later, it was too late — the child was no longer alive.

Eli was shattered. He was sure they could have saved the boy had they gotten there in time. He’d been riding an ambulance for close to two years, and they always seemed to arrive too late when the clock was ticking. But he was just 16, and how could a teenager change things, anyway? Still, Eli Beer knew there had to be a better way.

Always Too Late

Today, Eli Beer and his organization are household names. What Israeli child doesn’t know about dialing 1221 in case of any emergency? As founder and head of Israel’s United Hatzalah, he hasn’t stopped with creating the country’s most sophisticated and well-oiled rapid emergency medical first response service. Eli’s dream is to bring the cutting-edge Israeli lifesaving model to cities across the globe and literally save the world. From Panama to Dubai to Bangladesh, at least 21 countries have been working with Beer to export United Hatzalah in order to set up similar rapid medical response services on their own turf.

Beer, a solution-driven maverick whose long-range goal is to cut down response time to 90 seconds for any medical emergency, anywhere on earth, is the visionary behind Hatzalah’s 5,000 trained volunteers, the organization’s famed “ambucycle” (a motorcycle equipped with everything an ambulance has except a stretcher, and which gets the first responder to the patient in less than three minutes), the “ambuboat” (for rapid rescue in the water), a dispatch center with the latest GPS tracking technology (able to locate and dispatch the five closest EMS responders within three seconds of an emergency), and other lifesaving innovations. But growing up, he was one of those kids with lots of energy but not too much zitsfleish for the standard classroom, and credits his out-of-the-box childhood in Jerusalem — and his ever-tolerant parents — for planting the seeds of that dream.