Eli and Gitty Beer relive the miracle of recovery and return

Photos: Flash90, Shira Hershkop,Yechiel Gorfein

Around the world, people were praying for the refuah sheleimah of Hatzolah’s Eli Beer. When he finally walked down the steps of the Adelson family’s private jet after nearly succumbing to the killer virus, it was, says his wife, like witnessing techiyas hameisim

By now, everyone has surely seen, or at least heard about, the image of indefatigable Israel’s Ichud Hatzolah founder and head Eli Beer walking off the plane at Ben Gurion airport, after surviving a critical bout of COVID-19 which nearly left him as another tragic corona statistic.

And for his wife, Gitty Beer, an ambulance driver and Hatzolah medic herself who was on the tarmac to bring him home while surrounded by an orange sea of Hatzolah vehicles, it was like techiyas hameisim.

Gitty told Mishpacha she’s used to Eli being gone for months at a time — he spends about 200 days a year abroad raising funds for Hatzolah and helping create emergency medical services around the world similar to Israel’s most sophisticated and well-oiled rapid emergency medical first response service (“Our kids call him avinu shebashamayim”) and had been gone since Chanukah — but who would imagine that her young, healthy, hyperenergetic husband would be felled by a microscopic virus, unconscious for over a month, fighting for his life in a Miami hospital?

“I was traveling around and was hearing about corona, but I never thought I’d get it — I’m a healthy guy, don’t smoke, I never get sick, never need help, I’m busy saving others,” says Eli, talking from a friend’s quiet elevator-accessible apartment where he’s staying with his family, as the 80-stair climb to their fourth-floor home in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood is right now not an option.

He had been in India for a TED talk, then traveled to England, New York, L.A., the AIPAC conference, and had stopped for some events in Miami including the bar mitzvah of a good friend scheduled for the day after Purim. “I missed my family, so I told two of my kids to fly in and join me in Miami for Purim,” Eli says. “The next day I didn’t feel well, saw I had fever — I don’t remember ever having fever as an adult — and so on the spot, I called El Al and got my kids out on the next flight. Right away I isolated myself for three days, skipped the bar mitzvah because I didn’t want to put anyone at risk, and waited for the fever to pass. But it didn’t.

“Because,” Eli continues, “what happens is that meanwhile the disease is destroying your lungs, so really what you need to do is check your oxygen levels. Had I done that, I would have known how sick I was. But luckily, I had some good medical friends who told me to go straight to Miami University Hospital.”

After a chest x-ray, Eli found himself being whisked into the ICU. “I was there for three days but wasn’t getting better. Then the medical team came to me and said, ‘We have to put you to sleep and intubate you.’ Now, I know what intubation involves, and I was pretty nervous, but the truth is, I was fighting for every breath at that point. Still, I was sure two or three days later they’d wake me up.”