When so many others threw up their hands in despair, Rabbi Yehudah Kazsirer's team stepped forward — because for them, “impossible” doesn’t exist

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

It was the summer of 2004, and Yehudah Kazsirer, a Beth Medrash Govoha kollel yungerman who’d just begun volunteering with Lakewood’s Bikur Cholim Lev Rochel, was sitting in his office in the little house on Prospect Street where the organization was headquartered, when a call came in from Hatzolah: Their ambulance was three blocks away, with a 72-year-old woman in cardiac arrest. Could he run over to Monmouth Medical Center across the street to let the staff know they were coming in?

He ran across the street and let a nurse know that Hatzolah was a few minutes away, whereupon she hit a button setting off a code blue alert that shook the whole building and sent doctors and nurses springing into action. They were all assembled in the emergency room, awaiting the patient, but… where was the patient? Finally, the anesthesiologist asked, “Who called the code?”

The nurse said, “The rabbi did.”

“Since when does a rabbi call code?” the doctor retorted.

That’s when the nurse said something Rabbi Kazsirer has never forgotten: “I don’t know if the rabbi’s supposed to or not, but if he does, you’d better be here when the patient shows up.”

Just then, Hatzolah pulled up with the patient. They administered shocks to the patient’s heart, and three days later the woman was able to walk out of the hospital. Rabbi Kazsirer left with a lesson, too: Sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone and do things you’ve never done before.

Fast forward 16 years, and sitting in his office in the new Bikur Cholim complex built on the site of that little house — but now comprising offices and storage space, an industrial kitchen, and ten guest bedrooms and a dining room for patients’ families — Rabbi Kazsirer smiles at the memory. The organization, which he’s led as full-time director for six years now, has also spent the last six months far, far beyond its comfort zone, leading a dedicated fight against an unimagined pandemic that descended suddenly, eventually taking the lives of 70 frum Lakewood residents and bringing severe illness to several hundred others.

“In truth,” Rabbi Kazsirer reflects, “throughout this crisis period, we did what we do every day of the year, just on levels that were, of course, far higher. Where I’ll usually have five to ten emergencies to deal with on a daily basis, during the coronavirus crisis it was 50 to a hundred, multiplied by five, for the five people on our team. My teenaged daughter carried my second phone, writing down all the messages for me. On one day at the height of the crisis, I personally picked up over 500 calls, and many others here were doing the same.”

When the virus hit Lakewood hard shortly after Purim, Rabbi Kazsirer himself was one of the first to contract the illness, but he never stopped operating. Taking his computer and phone with him, he sat on his back porch in his winter coat, sweating out a fever, and continuing to work. He was one of the lucky ones — a week later he was done with the virus.

As patients were being admitted to hospitals at a dizzying pace, with 250 Lakewood residents ultimately being hospitalized in nine area medical centers, Bikur Cholim’s advocacy department went into overdrive. Every available person was drafted onto the team, some of whom had to have Internet quickly installed in their homes.

“In the beginning,” Rabbi Kazsirer recalls, “we were just trying to set patients up in the various hospitals in a fast-changing environment: We’ve already sent too many patients to this hospital, but that one still has room. This hospital is handling its cases well, the other one, not so much. This one is doing a certain type of therapy but another one isn’t.”

For an entire month, the team was in hourly contact with Dr. Howard Lebowitz, who runs Monmouth’s long-term acute-care facility and was Lakewood’s medical point man during the coronavirus outbreak. He had a tracker that kept tabs on every single Lakewood patient, which hospital they were in and what treatments they were receiving.

For his part, Dr. Lebowitz says that at the height of the pandemic, with a hundred Hatzolah calls and 20 critical care transports a day in Lakewood, there were conference calls all day long between Rabbi Kazsirer, his assistant, Liba Lederer, the captains of Hatzolah and himself, in order to decide where patients were going to go, who was going to receive them there, and who would arrange to get them the care and the food they needed.

“Bikur Cholim was on top of every single one of those patients, trying to get them the treatments they needed, communicating with the doctors and treatment team, and serving as the liaison between the hospital, the doctor, and the patient’s family, which was critical since families weren’t allowed into the hospitals during that time,” says Dr. Lebowitz. “When so many others got overwhelmed and stepped away, Yehudah Kazsirer and his team stepped toward the problem to solve it. It was an incredible display of ahavas Yisrael.”