Back from the brink of death, Eli Beer took his mission to the war zone and beyond

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Flash 90, United Hatzalah
Illustration: Menachem Weinreb

The newly grown beard, with its aura of pensiveness and age-acquired wisdom, is the clearest sign that United Hatzalah Israel founder Eli Beer is at an existential crossroads. With the shadow of near-death from Covid behind him and his 50th birthday looming ahead, the indefatigable maverick who transformed emergency medical services in Israel and beyond has undergone a profound personal reassessment.

His dedication to saving lives has always been unwavering, but Eli admits that his close brush with the Angel of Death has given him a newfound appreciation for the fragility of existence. And facing his own mortality has left him more determined than ever to use this upcoming milestone as a springboard for moving forward.

“Today I think about life a lot differently, and I look at life differently — I know that in one second it can all be over for any one of us,” he says, looking out a top-floor window of United Hatzalah’s Jerusalem headquarters at the ever-developing city entrance below. “You know, I thought I could live forever. I’ve gone into war zones, I’ve led rescue teams into natural disasters, I carry a gun to fend off terrorists, and still zoom around on a motorcycle saving people. And in one second it all turned around in the Covid ward of a Miami hospital when the doctor came in and told me, ‘Eli, in 30 minutes we’re putting you on a ventilator in an induced coma. Otherwise, you’ll be dead by the end of the day.’ I asked him, ‘What are my chances of survival if you intubate me?’ He told me, ‘Five percent.’ ”

It was just after Purim in 2020, and the microscopic coronavirus was rampaging in its original, most virulent form, felling thousands upon thousands around the world while the medical sector was stumbling in the dark trying to figure out treatment protocols. Eli, who still spends about 200 days a year abroad raising funds to cover United Hatzalah’s multi-million-dollar annual budget, had been in India for a TED talk, then traveled to England, New York, Los Angeles, 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. But then he developed a fever he couldn’t shake and contracted pneumonia-like symptoms, and some close medical friends insisted he go straight to Miami University Hospital, which was still admitting Covid patients.

“I was sure I was going to die, but how do you close up your life in 30 minutes?” Eli remembers thinking. “Okay, so this is the end of my life, I considered. I’m 46 years old, my daughter is expecting our first grandchild and I won’t live to see it. I had been following the news and knew what was happening, how they were bringing refrigerator containers into New York as makeshift morgues, how people were dropping in Italy, Spain, all over.

“So I thought, well, at least I did something good in my life — some people die at 46 and haven’t accomplished much — but what about the funding? After saying goodbye to my family, I called our international board chairman and one of our biggest donors, Mark Gerson, and told him, ‘Mark, I want you to promise not to stop donating to United Hatzalah just because I’m dead. Because this organization isn’t about me.’ He was crying on the phone, promising to make sure all the funding would stay in place. I was so relieved — thank G-d, what I built would not die. I would, but United Hatzalah wouldn’t.

“I then made a will on my phone for my wife Gitty, although later I learned that she erased it. And then the doctor came in and told me, ‘Sorry, we’re out of time.’ I woke up over a month later. I couldn’t believe I’d missed Pesach.”

Eli had angels looking after him and advocating for him, including Dr. Miriam Adelson [a doctor of internal and emergency medicine and the wife of billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson a”h, who together with her gave millions to Jewish and philanthropic causes] and Dr. Joel Sandberg, a well-connected Miami physician who spent hours every day trying to find a treatment for his critically-ill friend. Dr. Sandberg was instrumental in obtaining a lifesaving experimental drug based on stem-cell therapy, which received a one-time FDA approval for Eli.

The miracle happened, and the treatment worked. Eli was flown back to Israel on Dr. Miriam Adelson’s private jet. (When Gitty initially refused the gesture, Dr. Adelson told her, “Look, I’m sending Eli my private plane. Eli has saved so many lives, let’s just do this the right way.”) But Eli was so weak that he couldn’t walk, could barely talk (“I still can’t sing,” he says), and couldn’t even hold a fork. After recuperating for a period at the well-appointed home of friends in Tel Aviv (the Beers’ own fifth-floor no-elevator walk-up in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood was simply not an option), he took stock.

“When they were about to put me under, I was thinking, did I do enough? After I woke up, I realized I’d been given a reprieve — and that meant I needed to work harder than ever. But how? I told my wife recently, ‘Gitty, I’m going to be 50 in September. Our organization has treated almost six million people. What can I do to make it even better?’

“The truth is,” he admits with pride and a tinge of reluctance, “today everything is run by incredible teams and I’m just the motivator, the spirit in the back. I’m not really running the organization anymore. I have CEOs and CFOs, but I still have a clear mission, and it’s not so complicated. I know that every morning when I wake up, I want to push further on the path of the mission.” That mission, as many readers know, is a 90-second-or-less response time for any medical call, anywhere in the country.

“People are constantly offering me lucrative business deals because they assume after over three decades manning Israel’s Hatzalah enterprise, I’m burned out,” Eli says. “But so far, at least, I’m not going anywhere.”