Eli Beer was back in Israel by a miracle, after doctors in Miami told him he had 30 minutes to wrap up his life

Erased in a Day

It was that drive to save lives even against the odds, the deathbed recommitment to stretch beyond his limits, that pushed Eli Beer to send a group of Hatzalah volunteers to the war zone in Ukraine last year. And today, as the aggression and tensions continue to fester on both sides, Eli knows one truth: He and his team provided shelter and food for thousands of citizens suddenly rendered homeless refugees by tanks and missiles they had nothing to do with, and brought thousands more to start their lives over in Eretz Yisrael.

On the day the war broke out, United Hatzalah flew a team to Moldova to meet the thousands of refugees pouring across the border, most of them with little more than a bag or suitcase that contained the contents of their lives. Some were wounded, others were sick, contributing to the growing humanitarian crisis made worse by the bitter cold.

The first chartered United Hatzalah plane also carried 15 tons of humanitarian aid, much of it medical equipment for the field hospitals that had been set up close to the border. The organization also shipped food, warm clothing, blankets, heating pads, diapers, baby formula, other essentials the hapless refugees would need, and three sifrei Torah.

As the first rescue mission on the ground, it wasn’t long before everyone was clamoring to connect to the people in the bright orange jackets.

For many Hatzalah volunteers, though, Ukraine wasn’t foreign territory. Because of the constant flow of Jews to Uman and other Jewish enclaves, there was already an active Hatzalah infrastructure between Uman, Kiev, Odessa, Mezhibuzh and other towns, comprised of over a hundred local volunteers.

The week the war broke out, Eli happened to be in Boca Raton, Florida, as a guest Shabbos speaker in Rabbi Efrem Goldberg’s shul, when he was bombarded with phone calls.

“Our people in Ukraine were calling us, begging us to send more help, that Putin was going to attack and that it was going to be a humanitarian disaster,” Eli says. “But my first reaction was, ‘Na, Putin will never attack. Calm down. I’ll put down a thousand shekels that he won’t do such a crazy thing.’ Obviously, I lost a thousand shekels.

“We made a quick decision: We already had infrastructure in Ukraine, so we started building infrastructure out of Ukraine. We decided that out of all the countries bordering Ukraine, we’d focus on Moldova, because all the other countries bordering Ukraine — Hungary, Romania, Poland, Slovakia — are financed by the EU and are NATO-aligned, so they had the finances and recourses to handle an influx of refugees. Moldova, in contrast, is a poor country without ties, but with several active border points which we knew would be flooded with refugees. Plus, they had a strong Jewish community. We could only be in one place, so we needed to make an evaluation: Where would we have the most impact, where would we be needed most?”

El Al had partnered with United Hatzalah in other international disaster situations, and this time was no exception. There would be many rescue flights to airlift Jewish refugees to Israel, the first of which brought in an entire planeload of food and medical supplies, as Hatzalah set themselves up in the small Agudah kehillah in the capital city of Kishinev (or Chisinau, the modern name of the city), and from there made their way to the two borders Ukrainian refugees were using to cross over. It was freezing, and some of those refugees had been waiting at the border for days. Hatzalah volunteers gave them hot soup, attended to medical issues, and helped them move their packages and get settled.

Convoys of buses brought refugees from the border to the capital, to the various refugee centers and camps that were set up, designated by either region from Ukraine where the refugees came from, or religious or other social groupings. The Jewish community in Chisinau, together with United Hatzalah, set up a refugee camp for the Jewish refugees, where Hatzalah personnel helped facilitate their rescue flights to Israel. United Hatzalah was active in other refugee camps as well, including the city stadium that had thousands of people cycling in and out on a regular basis.

Overall, about 700 Hatzalah volunteers traveled back and forth during the first months of the war, and according to Eli, many of them came back traumatized — and so did he.

“I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it,” he says. “These were regular people with regular suitcases, nice coats, standing in line for hours on the border with nothing left, having to start life all over again — well-dressed, middle-class people whose lives as they knew it were erased in one day.”

As the first rescue mission on the ground, it wasn’t long before everyone was clamoring to connect to the people in the bright orange vests

Bombing the Bread Line

One of the heroes of Moldova was Linor Attias, who is part of United Hatzalah’s women’s initiative as well as a general medic. Linor was just a young teenager when her uncle, Yechiel Tubol, was killed in the Café Hillel terrorist bombing in 2003, but during the shivah she’d already made a decision: She would train to manage emergency medical situations. Her uncle’s life was lost, but perhaps she could save others. Today Linor is part of the Emergency National Authority of the IDF, and as a United Hatzalah volunteer, dedicates every call to the neshamah of her uncle.

As an expert in emergency crisis situations, the first thing she tackled was opening the skies of Moldova so that rescue flights could operate. Moldova had closed the skies because the Russian bombers would circle back over the little country after hitting their targets in Ukraine; Linor knew she’d have to convince the minister of transportation and security to bend the rules for their operation to succeed.

“There was a big humanitarian crisis in Moldova, people were sleeping in the streets, and the government had no resources to help them,” she says. “We told them, ‘We want to get these refugees out and you want them out, so let’s open the skies during the day — the bombings were at night — and start moving these people out of the country. And if those planes can land, we’ll bring in humanitarian aid and hospital supplies.’”

In the end, over 35 planes flew back and forth, each plane (including private crafts) taking between 50 and 195 refugees, United Hatzalah altogether facilitating the airlift of over 3,000 Jewish refugees. When El Al ran out of planes, they commissioned Air Moldova, Arkia, Air Ukraine (which was operating from Moldova), and even private cargo flights. They also airlifted over 300 people with medical conditions, which meant buying ambulances in Europe for transport and accessing medical flights that were staffed with medical personnel and met by United Hatzalah ambulances on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport.

Linor, who was holding the intelligence information about traveling the roads, still can’t share many of the operational tactics they utilized, but describes the fallout.

“We had three buses of refugees who fled after the tanks rolled into the Kiev suburb of Bucha and simply ran over the people who were standing in line to take their ration of bread and vegetables, then bombed the buildings,” she says. “We had no idea what their medical condition was, and had to wait until they got to the border so that we could begin to treat them.

“There was one woman who caught my eye — her name was Pauline, an 87-year-old former English teacher, whose face was bruised and filthy. I cleaned her face, brought her to the Jewish shelter, and while she was eating the hot soup, she started to cry. ‘Paulina, why are you crying, you’re safe now,’ I asked her. She told me that her husband was in that bread line, and from the window of her house, she saw how the Russian tanks ran him over. Her son passed away from cancer, and now she had no one. This was just one example of the overwhelming sadness we confronted every day.”

Save My Baby

Every day the drama was different, and it started when Eli Beer was still in Boca during the first days of the war. (Initially, he says, he didn’t think it would be such a large-scale catastrophe. But in the weeks that followed, Eli would move into the war zone and make several trips on rescue flights between Israel and Moldova.) He’d received a frantic phone call from a United Hatzalah supporter who was somehow tracked down by an Israeli woman who had just given birth in a small hospital outside Kiev. The hospital had been bombed and the 80 newborns had been separated from their mothers and were about to be moved into an orphanage. The woman begged and pleaded with him to save her one-day-old baby before the infant would get lost in the shuffle and perhaps lose his life in another bombing.

“There was one person I trusted to handle this emergency,” Eli says. “I called my son-in-law Aharon ben Aroush. He’s a Breslover who’d lived in Uman for several years and was very well-connected. He and his friends were busy cooking 5,000 meals for refugees, having stationed themselves in a pub United Hatzalah rented that had been closed down since Covid.

“‘Aharon,’ I said, ‘what are you doing now?’ He told me, ‘I’m cooking fish.’ I told him, ‘Get someone else to cook the fish. We need you to get a one-day-old baby out of Ukraine.’

“Aharon called his friends in Kiev, who connected him with a Jewish doctor who said he’d get the baby out for a thousand dollars. Private citizens weren’t allowed in the war zone — they’d get shot on the street — but doctors had travel permits. He got the baby out of the hospital, and a Chabad family agreed to transport the baby to the border of Moldova, bribing their way into gas stations and through police barricades. We even got the Israeli ambassador to meet them at the border and give the baby a temporary travel document so that we wouldn’t be charged with kidnapping.”

Never Say No

United Hatzalah is no stranger to international humanitarian crises — over the past decade, volunteers have traveled to earthquake zones, floods, and other disasters. Eli would never downplay the very real humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, but what personally propelled him to act this time was the Jewish crisis — the 200,000 Jews in the country whose towns and homes were being destroyed.

“And,” he says, “for me, it’s all really about my father and the lifelong lesson he taught me.”

Rabbi Gavriel Beer a”h, who made aliyah with his wife, Chaya yblch”t, and six children in 1969, four years before Eli was born, was the proprietor of the iconic Beer’s Book Store in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood, and not only knew everything about seforim, but was a real estate askan as well. He also had the trust of the gedolim in America and for years served as the Agudah’s gabbai tzedakah in Eretz Yisrael.

Rabbi Beer was born on the Lower East Side in 1928, attended Torah Vodaath, and as an eleven-year-old, began hearing rumblings of war and horror. At the time, few American Jewish organizations had stepped up to the plate to help, but Zeirei Agudas Yisrael was one organization that began collecting money for the Vaad Hatzalah.

“Every day after yeshivah,” Eli recounts, “my father would go around for hours collecting money for the Vaad, first by knocking on doors with his pushke and then upping his ante by going into stores and businesses. One day, he goes into a jewelry store — he saw it was a Jewish store as there was a mezuzah on the door — approaches the proprietor with his pushke, and the man says, ‘The Jews of Europe are not my problem. Let them handle their own problems. I’m an American Jew, not a European Jew. Get out.’

“My father was devasted — and humiliated. He couldn’t believe a fellow Jew would have such a reaction, and he began to cry. Just then, another businessman sees this kid crying on the street and asks what’s the matter. ‘I’m collecting for the Vaad Hatzalah, and someone screamed at me to get out of his store and embarrassed me,’ my father said. And then the man said, ‘Come to my store and I’ll help you.’ He gave him five dollars, which was a lot back then, and told him to come back every week for another five dollars.

“A few years later, after the war ended, my father was still collecting, although this time it was a little different,” Eli continues. “He was learning in Telshe yeshivah in Cleveland, when his father died suddenly and he had to return home to help his mother with the business. My grandmother owned a small hotel in Saratoga Springs, and people would stay at the hotel when they came to the mountains to gamble at the horse races. My father assumed that a lot of the less-religious guests came to the hotel because they liked my grandmother’s heimishe cooking, but he eventually figured out that many of those guests were underworld Mafiosos who could do their business there without anyone bothering them.

“One night, my father went up to a table of these toughs and bravely asked them, ‘I want to know if you’d consider helping me find a way to get weapons to Palestine so that Jewish fighters can defend themselves against the Arab armies.’ ‘Let’s say we can,’ answered one of the mobsters. ‘But who will pay for it?’ ‘I will,’ my father reassured them.

“He was determined to raise the funds, just like he tirelessly did as a kid with his pushke during the Holocaust. And he did. He raised thousands of dollars and those mobsters delivered the weapons to my grandmother’s hotel, where they stayed hidden until they could be loaded onto ships sailing for Eretz Yisrael.

“Sure, it was dangerous, and some of those caches were intercepted by the British, but my father couldn’t conscionably sit back comfortably knowing his brethren in Eretz Yisrael were fighting for their lives. He needed to do his part.

“And this impacted me for the rest of my life. I decided that I would never say no to a Jew who’s in trouble, no matter who he is or where he is.”

Eli thought of his father when he met Misha, a 95-year-old man who he found at the Moldovan border, freezing, with no papers and no provisions. Misha spoke a bit of Yiddish and said he had a sister in Israel, and Eli became his patron, giving him his own scarf, taking him to a Jewish shelter, and even escorting him on a plane to Israel.

“He’d never been on a plane before and he was petrified. I sat with him the entire time,” Eli says. “But it wasn’t only a chesed for him. For me, it was a kind of closure. My father’s been gone ten years, but I wish he could have seen this. Eighty years ago, no one was waiting on the tarmac for refugees with orange vests and signs in Hebrew saying welcome.”

The boy who thought he wouldn’t amount to anything had managed to change the face of emergency medical response in Israel and beyond

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? And there’s even a new book out about him — 90 Seconds, by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer (Shaar Press/Mesorah) — a special gift for the man who as a boy couldn’t sit still, was constantly being thrown out of class, and felt he’d never amount to anything.

Somehow, though, lifesaving became his passion early on. He attributes his obsession to a Friday morning in the summer of 1978, when he was not yet five years old, walking home from his Bayit Vegan cheder with his older brother 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 lying on the sidewalk begging us to help him get up,” Eli says. “He was yelling at me, ‘yeled, yeled, bo taazor li (please help me)!’ but there was so much blood and I was paralyzed with fear that my brother and I just ran away. I thought about that man for weeks, months, maybe even years, wondering if anyone helped him, or if maybe he’d died before the rescue teams arrived.”

Meanwhile, he spent the next years struggling through school, but 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 while he was eating lunch. “His mother called frantically, but when we got there 21 minutes later after weaving our way through heavy midday traffic, it was too late. We tried our best — Heimlich, CPR — while the mother was screaming at us that we killed her son by not showing up immediately. 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 and she blamed 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.’ ”

After the reprieve. “Now I needed to work harder than ever. What could I do to make it even better?”

Snoopers with a Cause

Eli had already heard about American Hatzalah’s phenomenal success over the two decades since its inception in 1969 — founded by Rabbi Herschel Weber and a few other motivated volunteers in Brooklyn who started out by carrying oxygen tanks and first-aid kits in their cars. And so, he decided to create his own little Hatzalah with his high school friends in his Jerusalem neighborhood. At the time, there were already some neighborhood Hatzalahs, plus 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. “But I realized that even if there’s someone with knowledge who’s close by but doesn’t know what’s happening, he won’t be able to help. So, brave and bold teenager that I was, 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, and 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 be there — we’ll even buy the beepers ourselves.’ I was sure he’d embrace the idea, but instead he basically laughed me out of the office.

“Well, 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 while 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 finally arrived, I told them what happened and they said, ‘How did you get here?’ I told them I just happened to be walking down the street.”

Two days later, the Beers got a call — the man woke 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.’”

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 schnorred 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 was helping his father run the book shop and the real estate business, was fundraising for Hatzalah Jerusalem, and had even gotten married — to Gitty Heftler, his next-door neighbor whom he’d known since they were in playgroup together.

Strength in Unity

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. But the “revolution,” as Eli calls it, started in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War.

“That summer the Galil was being shelled nonstop, and the Hatzalah groups up north desperately needed help,” Eli says. “I realized, if everyone is united under the same missiles, 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 creating something on a national scope that would be unbeatable in terms of both achdus and efficiency.

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 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 Elyashiv 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, with one caveat: 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 Rav Sinai Halberstam of Bnei Brak, and Rav Aryeh Dvir and Rav Ezriel Auerbach of Jerusalem.)

One day, Eli got a call from two Arabs in East Jerusalem, who also wanted to join Hatzalah and save lives in their own communities with quicker response time.

“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 they could help us with that, then maybe it could work,” Eli relates. The Arab volunteers all go through multiple security checks, many of them are Druze and have served in the army — and they also have to take the halachah course in order to learn about Shabbos and religious sensibilities.

Today United Hatzalah — with its 6,000 volunteers, nearly a thousand ambucycles, 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.”

We Love the Action

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 in Jerusalem, he takes emergency calls like every other volunteer. And he doesn’t deny that, obsessed as he is with saving lives, he loves the action as well.

“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 three a.m. a 90-year-old woman 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 an old man at this point. I’ve been doing this for 33 years. I’ve seen babies torn to pieces in terror attacks and I’ve seen beautiful babies born. 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 was also one of the action guys who would always get high on that adrenaline surge. And even after everything I’ve been through, I guess I still do.”

After 33 years of nonstop adrenaline, is he starting to feel burned out? “Look, I never considered myself indispensable. We have great leadership, amazing people. I’ve already learned that if I’d disappear, nothing would happen — but I can’t. I’ve already committed to an even better future.”

(Originally feature in Mishpacha, Issue 969)