In 1969, four years before Eli was born, Rabbi Gavriel Beer and his wife, Chaya, made aliyah with six children in tow. Rabbi Beer a”h, proprietor of the iconic Beer’s Book Store in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood (it’s where every local yeshivah and seminary student shopped for their sifrei kodesh, before the mass American migration across town to Har Nof), not only knew everything about seforim, but was a real estate askan as well. He also had the trust of the gedolim in America, served as the Agudah’s gabbai tzedakah in Eretz Yisrael, and was involved in the development of the Eretz Hachaim Cemetery outside Beit Shemesh.

The Beer children were always an eclectic bunch: One of Eli’s brothers is a Gerrer chassid, one is a Lubavitcher, one is a Litvak, a brother-in-law was Rav Shimon Yosef Edelstein a”h — son of Ponevezh Rosh Yeshivah Rav Gershon Edelstein — who passed away last summer, another brother is a “general” chassid, and as for Eli, the baby of the family, “I’m the ‘general’ Jew.”

He attributes his obsession with lifesaving to the time when he was five years old, walking home from his Bayit Vegan cheder with his older brother on an Erev Shabbos, when the Number 12 bus blew up right in front of them, killing five people and injuring a few dozen. “I remember this old man yelling to us to help him get up,” Eli says, “but we were so scared we just ran away. Pretty much from then on all I would think about was that I wanted to be a doctor one day. I became fixated on saving a life.”

Cheder and yeshivah weren’t so much his thing, so Eli’s parents were actually relieved when, at 15, he discovered that he could take an EMT course and become a volunteer with Magen David Adom. “I felt amazing,” Eli remembers. “Now I could finally learn how to save people. I took the basic course, learned some CPR, and was raring to go.”

The first time he used that CPR was on a call for a woman who’d had a heart attack. “We worked on her, but finally a doctor came and pronounced her dead. I felt terrible. I was an idealistic 15-year-old, and we were out to save this woman. Why couldn’t we have saved her?”

Eli remembers how in the course of close to two years on the ambulance, the scenario kept repeating itself. “We helped a lot of people,” he says, “but when life and death was a question of minutes, we were never there in time. The distance, the traffic — it would take us 15 to 20 minutes to get there, but it was always too late.”

And then there was the seven-year-old boy who’d choked on a hot dog. “His mother called frantically, and here we were, weaving our way through traffic in order to save this kid,” Eli remembers. “When we got there 21 minutes later, we tried our best — Heimlich, CPR — while the mother was screaming at us. Then a doctor who lived down the block saw the ambulance and ran over to help. But after checking the boy, he realized it was all over. He told us, ‘There’s nothing to do. Bring a sheet and cover him.’

“That was the worst day of my life. The mother was so broken, she felt her own life was over. She yelled at us, blaming us for killing her son. I was 16-and-a-half years old and saw a boy choke to death because we got there too late. A doctor was a few houses away but no one thought of calling him. I was shattered. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘I quit. I’ll never save a life on the back of an ambulance.’”

Listening In

Exactly 20 years earlier on a Brooklyn street, newly-married Rabbi Herschel Weber was walking home from shul when a man collapsed in front of him. Reb Herschel had no idea what to do to help the man, and so he summoned the police. The police officer summoned emergency personnel, but by the time they arrived, the man was dead. When Reb Herschel heard one officer say to the other, “if only we’d gotten here earlier, we could have saved him,” he knew it was a message with a personal meaning — and he decided to take action. He didn’t know anything about emergency medicine or equipment, but that didn’t stop him from heading over to Bob’s Surgical Supplies to buy an oxygen tank. Then he went to the American Red Cross and took a crash course in first aid. And that’s how Hatzalah, the largest rapid-response paradigm in the Jewish world, began back in 1969 — with Reb Herschel and a few other motivated volunteers carrying oxygen tanks and first-aid kits in their cars.

Eli knew about American Hatzalah’s phenomenal success over the two decades since its inception and decided to create his own little Hatzalah with his high school friends in his Jerusalem neighborhood. There were already some neighborhood Hatzalahs then, and many Magen David Adom volunteers, scattered throughout the city, who were on call for emergencies.

“There were about 15 of us, all EMTs, and we decided we were going to protect our neighborhood, to run to the scene before the ambulance arrived,” says Eli. “I realized that ambulances alone don’t save lives, people save lives, and if there’s someone with knowledge who’s close by but doesn’t know what’s happening, we have to find a way to fix that. So I approached my supervisor at MDA and told him that we want to help, we want to be able to get there and stabilize the patient until the ambulance shows up — all we need is the information. I told him, ‘We have these 15 amazing guys who will drop everything and run to the scene, just alert us by beeper and we’ll run — we’ll even buy the beepers ourselves.’ Well, I was just a kid, and he basically laughed me out of the office and told me to go find another hobby.

“Hmm, I thought, if they don’t want to share the calls with us, we’ll just get the information ourselves. So the next day we went out and bought two police scanners and tapped into their emergency frequency. We did shifts listening in, and that way we knew where the ambulances were headed.”

The first day of Eli’s shift, he was helping out in his father’s store and listening to the police scanner, when he heard about an emergency just a block away. A 70-year-old man was hit by a car and was bleeding profusely from his neck.

“I ran over — everyone was crowding around, waiting for the ambulance, but no one was touching him. I took one look and knew I had to stop the bleeding but I had no medical equipment on me, so I took off my yarmulke, folded it into a triangle, pushed it against the wound, and with a lot of pressure, was able to stop the bleeding. When the ambulance arrived, I told them what happened and they said, ‘How did you get here?’ I said I was just walking down the street…”

Two days later, the Beers got a call — the man had woken up and wanted to see the young boy who saved him. “When I went into his room, he gave me a hug,” says Eli. “That was the best hug I ever got in my life — I actually saved a person! When the doctor came in, he told me, ‘Kid, if you didn’t stop the bleeding when you did, he’d be dead.’ He was on Coumadin, a blood thinner, and he would have bled to death.”

Eli was just 18 when he went to work helping to set up Jerusalem Hatzalah. “We finally made a deal with MDA that we could listen to their calls, but we had nothing,” he remembers. “The first person I saved was with my yarmulke, but we needed some real equipment.” Back then, every volunteer who joined had to put some money into the pot, and they were responsible for raising funds for their own equipment.

“One guy had protektziya here, another shnorred equipment from there, but nothing was standardized. People would use their own cars — I used to go out on calls with my father’s old Peugot.”

A year later, Eli decided it was time to get married, and he knew exactly who his bride would be — Gitty Heftler, his next-door neighbor, whom he’d known since they were in playgroup together. The Heftlers, together with Mrs. Heftler’s father, Leo Gartenberg, were the owners of the Pioneer Country Club in the Catskills (where Rav Moshe Feinstein would stay) before making aliyah, and Mr. Heftler, a savvy businessman in his own right, appreciated the guts and grit of his young neighbor, who decided to be his own shadchan as he approached his future father-in-law.

At the time, Eli was helping his father run the book shop and the real estate business, was fundraising for Jerusalem Hatzalah, and, he says, acknowledging his distinctive non-yeshivish look (he’s partial to pink plaid shirts), “I was even learning a few hours a day, in Beis” (Yeshivas Beis Yisrael, when it was still located in Bayit Vegan in its early days).

We’re Behind You

Today Eli Beer spends about 200 days a year abroad (“Our kids call him avinu shebashamayim,” says Gitty Beer), but that’s nothing new. From the time of Hatzalah Jerusalem’s inception in 1992, Eli has been flying around the world to fundraise, and also to help start new organizations using the Hatzalah model.

With Eli as fundraiser and operations coordinator, the organization grew to widen its scope around the country. The “revolution,” as Eli calls it, started in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War.

“Nachi Klein, head of Hatzalah in Tzfas, called me in desperation. The north was being shelled nonstop, and they needed help,” Eli says. “I realized, everyone is united under the same missiles, so why not unite Hatzalah too?”

But what seemed reasonable wasn’t so simple to implement. There were many Hatzalah groups, who were pretty much protective of their own territory, and city and neighborhood organizations, especially those that were well-funded, were afraid they’d have to bear the burden for the rest. But Eli, charming, charismatic, persuasive, and driven, knew this was an opportunity for unity, for creating something on a national scope that would be unbeatable in terms of both achdus and efficiency.

“I brought a hundred people from different Hatzalahs to a bomb shelter in Hadera, where we had a ten-hour meeting. In the end, over 90 percent of the different organizations were in. They all said, ‘Eli, we’re behind you.’ Looking back,” says Eli, “I think the biggest accomplishment of my life was being able to unite all these groups under one umbrella.”

This new United Hatzalah made three resolutions: They would only take professional EMTs after a minimum of 200 hours of training and 100 hours of ambulance duty, they would only train people from age 21 and up, and the long-term goal would be a 90-second response time. And, it would all be free.

“I went to the gedolei hador — to Rav Elyashiv and ybdlch”t Rav Kanievsky — to ask for guidance on how to implement all this,” Eli says. “Up until now, Hatzalah was like a frum men’s club and I didn’t imagine we’d be working with people who don’t look like us, but we were aiming for 90 seconds around the country, so I asked Rav Chaim if I could bring in non-religious people as well and he encouraged it. He said it’s the biggest mitzvah — there are all kinds of Jews all over the country and if we want a 90-second response time, we need to have volunteers everywhere. So we took secular Jews into the organization in order to spread out all over, and it’s really remarkable that until today, every volunteer, frum or not, goes through our entire halachah course and submits to the rulings of our rabbanim.” (United Hatzalah’s poskim are Rav Yehuda Silman, Rav Sariel Rosenberg, and Rabbi Sinai Halberstam of Bnei Brak, and Rav Aryeh Dvir and Rav Ezriel Auerbach of Jerusalem.)

Then one day, Eli got a call from two Arabs in East Jerusalem, Mohammed Asli and Morad Alian. They wanted to join Hatzalah too. “Mohammed told me that he watched his father die after suffering a heart attack while waiting for the ambulance, which took 55 minutes to arrive. He told me, ‘I want to join you to learn how to save lives of both Jews and Arabs.’

Well, secular Jews are one thing, but taking in Arabs? I knew we’d get a lot of flak from many of our volunteers, but this wasn’t about making a minyan, it was about saving lives, and if Mohammed could help us with that, then maybe it could work. I told him, ‘Mohammed, get me 25 people who will work with you,’ and he did. I never had any relationship with Arabs before. This isn’t Peace Corps and we don’t have any kind of socio-political mission here. We want to save lives and that’s why we’re working together. It’s not about interfaith — it’s about 90 seconds.”

The Arab volunteers have all been through multiple security checks, and most of them are Druze and have served in the army. They’ve also become the valued “Shabbos goys” for non-life-threatening calls.

In fact, when Eli’s father, Rabbi Beer, had a heart attack eight years ago, one of the Arab volunteers Eli trained saved his life (Rabbi Beer passed away a year and a half later).

Closest Call

Eli’s 90-second mantra pushed Hatzalah to create the first GPS technology in the world to locate the closest medic, but that too came on the heels of a tragedy. A Hatzalah volunteer was vacationing in Eilat, when in the very same hotel a child went into cardiac arrest and died. “This medic was devastated,” says Eli. “He came to me and said, ‘Eli, how can we fix this?’ Dovi Meisel [United Hatzalah’s director of international operations] then told me, ‘Eli, they have these phone GPS things today — let’s see if we can connect a GPS to everyone’s phones in order to locate the closest volunteers.’”

A company called Nowforce would be able to create a location-based dispatch system, but it would cost a million dollars to implement. Eli sent up a prayer, then wrote a letter to Mrs. Cherna Moskowitz, who together with her husband, Dr. Irving Moskowitz a”h, has been generously supporting Jewish and Israeli causes since 1968 through the Moskowitz Foundation.

“I told her that we want to advance the whole system in Israel from walkie-talkies, beepers, and scanners to this. That we want to create multiple algorithms — who is the closest, who has the right equipment, and who is the best-trained for the emergency. That we want to find the closest and best five volunteers and also avoid traffic. She said, here’s a million dollars, go do it.

“We call it the Moskowitz LifeCompass,” Eli continues. “Now hundreds of companies have copied the model. Think of it as an Uber for first responders.”

The dispatch center takes up much of the main floor in United Hatzalah’s headquarters across from Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station. All emergency calls throughout the country are channeled here — about 1,000 calls a day.

“In fact,” says Eli, “this is one of the ten targets of Hamas — because of what we do, and because newly-resigned Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s office is on the top floor.” To that end, Hatzalah has an additional dispatch center — downstairs in the basement bunker, behind layers of reinforced concrete.

Today United Hatzalah — with its 5,000 volunteers, 850 ambucycles (“everyone wants one, but we’re limited and so we give them to the most active volunteers”), 35 private ambulances, a state-of-the-art dispatch center, and ongoing emergency medical training and equipment for new volunteers — sits on an annual $25 million annual budget. And most of it falls on Eli Beer’s broad shoulders.

“I once went to Rav Chaim and told him that my biggest challenge is raising money,” Eli says. “I asked him, ‘Rav Chaim, can you give me a brachah that one donor should cover the entire budget?’ He said, ‘Chas v’shalom. You have to give everyone the zechus. In fact, I’m going to come to Yerushalayim and give you some money so I can also be part of the zechus.’ Believe it or not, he came up to my office on Succos and gave me 200 shekels.”

Lights, Sirens, Action

Let’s face it: When you see the guy with the peyos and the orange vest rushing to an emergency, you probably think cool guy, loves action.

“Look,” says Eli, “some people call us the lamed vav tzaddikim and some people say it’s just a bunch of guys who want to be cool and think they’re Superman. But I’ll tell you something interesting. Hatzalah is made up of thousands of people who love action. If they wouldn’t love action, they wouldn’t be in Hatzalah. Sure, they have to deal with blood and guts and they are the bravest of the brave, but let’s be honest — they don’t only want to save lives, they want to feel good about themselves, they want to be heroes and feel like they’ve accomplished something. But if all those things get them to help save people — when at 3 a.m. a 90-year-old lady is on the floor and these guys are running in pajamas to save her — who cares if they’re doing it because they like action? The ones who don’t like action are in their beds sleeping.”

And what about Eli Beer, who bought a police scanner when he was a kid in order to chase ambulances?

“I’ll say it openly, I love action, too,” he admits. “I love going out there, driving my motorcycle with the lights and sirens blaring. But I’m already an old man. I’ve been doing this for 29 years. I’ve seen babies torn to pieces in terror attacks and I’ve seen beautiful babies born — I’ve personally delivered 41 babies — and I’ve also seen babies die in front of my eyes. But you know, every time I help someone, it still feels like my first day. It’s amazing how much adrenaline you get by helping people. So for me it’s a privilege, and yes, I’m also one of the action guys who gets high on that adrenaline charge.”

Everyone who has that fantasy of selfless chesed combined with action wants to join Hatzalah. Eli says he’s bombarded with calls from people begging to be let into the training — but training is expensive, and volunteers need to be spread out.

“In Bnei Brak, for example, we’re saturated,” Eli says. “Before a person hits the floor there are already two volunteers by him. But I had this guy who called me up — begging to join a hundred times, until I told him, ‘Please stop calling me, we just don’t have room in Bnei Brak anymore.’ So he asks me, ‘Where are you missing volunteers? I tell him, ‘Ramat Gan.’ Two months later he calls me back. He says ‘I want to join.’ I say, ‘I told you you can’t join.’ He says, ‘But I moved to Ramat Gan.’”

Eli Beer might be sitting on top of this multi-million dollar organization, but there’s no hierarchy when it comes to emergencies. When he’s home, he has his technology on his phone and runs off like every other volunteer. Like the time he received a call about an unconscious child at a special-needs daycare center in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood. According to the GPS, Eli was the closest medic to the scene, so he dropped what he was doing, raced down a flight of rain-slicked stairs — and slipped and fell on his unsteady ankle. Ignoring the pain and swelling, the adrenaline and realization that a child’s life was on the line kept him in motion, propelled him into his car and onto the scene, where he treated the boy until the ambulance came. Eli wound up in the same hospital, got his ankle casted, and then hobbled over to visit the little fellow whose life he saved.

And whether he’s in Israel or flying around the world, when it comes to an emergency, he always seems to be in the right place at the right time. On board an El Al flight last year from Newark to Ben Gurion, Eli saved the life of a Detroit man on his way to Israel for his grandson’s bar mitzvah. The man was convulsing and unresponsive, and after a check of his vitals, Eli could tell the man was hypoglycemic — his lack of glucose was so severe that he was about to fall into a coma. Eli needed a glucometer — which he got from one of the other passengers — and meanwhile, he forced the man to keep swallowing bits of honey and jam, staying with him for over two hours until his condition stabilized.

When we were standing on congested, traffic-flooded Rechov Yirmiyahu outside Hatzalah headquarters doing a photo shoot, every five seconds someone else would honk to Eli, the quintessential people person. He seemed to know everyone on the street. He must have shaken two dozen hands in those few minutes.

“He literally knows all of Yerushalayim,” says his wife, Gitty. “He’s a hyper-friendly guy. He loves people, has a passion for people. And he wants to see them alive and well, and that’s what pushes him every single day. He believes he needs to save the world, and so he decided to do it.

“The thing about Eli is that he really is fearless. He isn’t afraid of anything, but instead sees every complication as another challenge. And that’s why he’s the ultimate problem-solver — it could be something as simple as where to put something in the house because there’s too much clutter, to how to get the fastest response time from emergency medical personnel.

“Whenever he sees the need,” says his wife, “he just zooms in and fixes it. Most people, for example, don’t even know about the ‘Tein Kavod’ unit Eli set up after he once went on a call to an elderly person who had been sick for days and no one even knew.

“He realized that there are many people out there who literally have no one to look after them, so he opened this unit where hundreds of volunteers are assigned to these lonely elderly people whose names we get from the Welfare Ministry,” says Gitty. “They come in once a week, test the person’s sugar level, blood pressure, do blood tests if necessary, and any other constant monitoring that needs to be done. If they see anything not right, they’ll call an ambulance right away. They’ll also go through the house, checking to see the refrigerator situation and whether the heat or air conditioning is working, or whether the person has a sufficient blanket. They’re real angels.”

Emergency Export 

As “90 seconds” is close to becoming a reality in Israel, nations around the globe are looking at the Hatzalah prototype. “It’s one of Israel’s best gifts to the world,” Eli says. But why should he care about emergency medicine in India, or in Dubai, or even Iran, for that matter?

“For one thing,” he says, “it’s a huge kiddush Hashem. We get emails every day from different countries — imagine, they want to set up a Hatzalah in Iran! I was in Saudi Arabia, the government of Dubai flew me in twice, I’ve met with the prime minister of India where we’ve set up a huge organization, and now we’re sending a team to Bangladesh. You see, the basic goal of all emergency medical services has always been to reduce ambulance arrival time, but there is only so much you can shrink that, especially in places with congested or third-world streets. The Hatzalah innovation is the idea that if there is a trained person in the area equipped with lifesaving equipment, the ambulance’s arrival time becomes less relevant. Today Israel is the country of innovation, so the world is looking at us for this too.” (Countries who want to set up a Hatzalah model provide their own funding and grants. Funds raised for United Hatzalah remain exclusively in Israel.)

In 2013, Eli was invited to give a TED talk, which has gotten over a million views; he’s lectured at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; was invited to speak at the AIPAC conference (“where I drove my ambucycle onto the stage in front of 17,000 people and was sure the brakes would fail”); and was even featured in a documentary on the al-Jazeera satellite TV network.

Eli Beer might be taking Hatzalah to new frontiers, but after 29 years, even the most dedicated of men can get burned out. “Look, I never considered myself indispensable. We have great leadership, amazing people — guys like Moshe Teitelbaum who runs our Israel operations, Michael Brown in the US, and Mark Gerson who is chairman of our international board and covers overhead expenses. So if I’d disappear, nothing would happen — but I can’t. It’s my neshamah, my life. I love it too much.”

When a husband is so entrenched in his life’s mission, what’s a wife to do?

“Well,” says Gitty Beer, Eli’s easy-spirited other half, “I decided I wanted a relationship with the ‘other woman’ in his life. You know what they say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” And so, about three years ago she joined Hatzalah as a regular volunteer, and last year she opened a special women’s unit.

“The idea was that when we have women’s calls, like someone giving birth or someone who slipped in the bathtub — any emergency where a woman would be sensitive or uncomfortable about having a man — we send a woman to the call if we have someone close by. One of our ambulances also does an exclusive women’s shift.”

In fact, in the app that calls all Hatzalah members, if it’s a specifically woman’s call, in addition to searching for the closest volunteer, it will also search for the closest woman volunteer. There are about 100 active women volunteers in frum areas, and Gitty has also organized a midwife unit, staffed with volunteer midwives who get called when there is a birth.

Gitty Beer fills another role as well: as the archetypal Hatzalah matriarch, she’s the go-to person for other wives who might feel shortchanged with husbands always running out to calls — in the middle of a Shabbos seudah, or while bathing the kids. “It’s a huge mitzvah,” she says, “but that beeper can also be addictive.”

The Beers have another way of helping out Hatzalah families when domestic issues arise. It’s a tzedakah fund in memory of Gitty’s father, Yaakov Yechiel Michel Heftler. “Because,” says Gitty, “we’re so busy saving other lives, but sometimes we have to save the lives of our volunteers too.”

Gitty, who’s borne the brunt of raising their five children while Eli spends the better half of the year away, takes the Hatzalah lifestyle in stride. “We’re in it together,” she says, “and anyway, Eli’s not the kind of person who can sit still for too long either. He’s always got some project up his sleeve.”

Gitty is also a volunteer for Hatzalah’s own rapid psycho-trauma response unit, another one of Eli’s innovations, to help those who were not physically injured but were in close proximity to a trauma. “We gather them together and deal with them on the spot, to make sure they don’t go home with the terrible images unprocessed. It could be, for example, people close to a terrorist attack, a parent whose child took his own life, or passengers in a car that caused an accident. Because there are usually a lot more victims than the ones taken to the hospital.”

For all these things, she says, Eli — winner of Israel’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year award, the Presidential Award for Volunteerism, World Values Network’s Champion of Human Life award, and the Conference of European Rabbis’ Internet Entrepreneur Prize for Hatzalah’s LifeCompass app — is the ultimate solutionizer.

“I could be speaking to him about a problem that needs fixing, or a way of doing something better, and it looks like he’s not even listening. But then a few minutes later he says, ‘Gitty, I have an idea…’ and when he says that, I know that in two weeks or three weeks or by next year, it’s going to happen.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 737)