IFCJ and Zaka — Saving Lives in Israel
Zaka volunteers at work
Eighteen-year-old Shimie was studying the Torah at a Jerusalem library when the sound of an explosion ripped through the silence. “I immediately ran outside and headed toward the carnage,” he recalls. As Shimie approached the scene of the blast – which had been a terrorist attack – he felt frustrated that he had neither the equipment nor expertise to help the victims scattered around him.
At that moment he decided to join Zaka.
Zaka, which receives significant support from The Fellowship and its partners, is an elite squad of first responders to terror attacks, natural disasters, and other tragedies. They perform emergency medical procedures and search-and-rescue operations, but their specialty is identifying body parts for burial, a mission of great importance for those observing Jewish law.
Perhaps the most impressive element of Zaka is that all 1,500 members are volunteers.
In addition to serving Israel, a land rocked by countless terror attacks, Zaka has sent volunteers to assist in the wake of natural disasters and terrorist attacks around the globe, including Haiti, Japan, Mumbai, New Orleans, and New York City.
Drawn to this specialized service, Shimie volunteered for Zaka and, like all members, underwent extensive training before being sent into the field. Shimie keeps his Zaka beeper and walkie-talkie on him all day and night in the event of an emergency.
Just as Shimie will never forget the day of that terrorist attack in Jerusalem, there’s another event that’s seared in his memory. He was riding his motorcycle near the Jerusalem Central Bus Station in 2008 when he heard on his Zaka walkie-talkie that shots had been fired at a religious school for boys in the Mercav Harav neighborhood of Jerusalem. Within minutes, Shimie was the first respondent on the scene, where he learned that a lone Palestinian gunman had walked into the school, killed eight students, and wounded eleven more.
When Shimie entered the school library from a back entrance, he could hear shots still being fired. He later learned that these were likely the bullets that killed the terrorist,…
Read More » Comments (0) »Thursday, December 8th, 2011 at 10:22 AM | Amichai Farkas
Israeli doctors save Palestinian baby
Odai Al-Kafarna (Photo: Matthew Bell)
Odai Al-Kafarna, a seven-month-old Palestinian boy, was born with a hole in his heart, causing it to work inefficiently and start to wear out. His grandmother, Haniya, took him to Israel, where doctors performed a surgery to fix Odai’s heart and save his life. This is the kind of compassionate, life-saving work Israeli doctors do on a regular basis in the Holy Land:
Comments (10) »“In this case we caught it early,” said Godwin Jeffrey, a Tanzanian doctor on a three-year training stint with the Israeli non-profit organization, Save a Child’s Heart. “The patient will improve like any other person and he will have a very normal lifespan.”
Save a Child’s Heart is an Israeli-based group of pediatric heart surgeons who have saved more than 2,600 children with congenital heart defects from 36 countries including Iraq, Jordan, Sudan, and the Palestinian Authority. As well, Israel itself issues permits to more than 10,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip every year to enable them to seek medical attention at Israeli hospitals.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 at 2:59 PM | David Kuner
Passover’s a holy festival, but the holiness includes the Israeli “national sport” — cleaning
Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.
– Exodus 12:17-20
Many committed Christians know that Passover marks the Jews’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt, and may even know that it’s celebrated with a seder, a family meal that includes the recitation of the Haggadah, the traditional Jewish text that teaches the story of the Jews’ redemption from slavery and formation into the nation of Israel. If you’ve ever been to one, you might have enjoyed the liturgy and discussion or tasted traditional dishes like matzo ball soup, brisket or tzimmes, a sweet carrot dish.
You may even know that observant Jews refrain from eating food that has any sort of yeast in it, known as chametz. (Ashkenazi Jews–those of European origin–also avoid kitniyot, a category of food that includes items that were frequently mixed with grains, such as corn and legumes.)
What you may not realize is that, in keeping with the biblical instruction that “no yeast is to be found in your house,” observant Jews spent the weeks before Passover ridding their homes of all leavened food — and that doesn’t just mean making sure you eat the rest of the pasta, but it also means cleaning underneath the sofas and bookshelves to find the errant Cheerios the 3-year-old dropped.
For the Orthodoxly observant, “Passover cleaning” includes switching kitchenware to special sets of pots and pants and dishes that are used only during Passover and stored safely away during the rest of…
Read More » Comments (0) »Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 12:14 PM | Stand For Israel
Someone must be doing something right!
But the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end.
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul- then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.
Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you.
– Deuteronomy 11:11-17
Israel is entirely dependent on rain. The water level of the Sea of Galilee–Israel’s main source of fresh water–drops around 5 feet every year and needs to be replenished by rains during the rainy season (generally, the winter months between Sukkot and Passover). When rain doesn’t fall, the water level doesn’t rise. If there aren’t sufficient rains for a few years in a row (as has been the case for a number of years), the Sea of Galilee’s water level continues dropping.
For the last decade, the water level has been hovering around what Israelis call “the red line” — the level at which scientists say that the fresh water source is imperiled (some scientists have worried publicly that dropping too far below the line could cause mineral springs below the lake to burst through, which would turn the Galilee into another Dead Sea). The sea has been below the danger low pretty much constantly for…
Read More » Comments (3) »Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 7:59 AM | Stand For Israel
IDF charges two soldiers in Gaza breaches
Besides rampant inaccuracies and the fact that it didn’t really examine the actions of Hamas, one of the main reasons that supporters of Israel have been so critical of the Goldstone Report is that Israel already has military and civilian courts that are responsible for monitoring any misbehavior in the IDF.
In fact, the IDF itself investigated 36 cases of possible misbehavior among its troops during last year’s Operation Cast Lead, the incursion into Hamas-controlled Gaza to stop rocketfire targeting Israeli civilians. Most have been investigated and dismissed, but, last week, IDF investigators moved forward in charging two soldiers with the horrific act of using a 9-year-old boy as a human shield.
The two soldiers, staff sargeants from the prestigious Givati brigade, had the boy open sacks they thought might be booby-trapped with explosives. (The bags, thankfully, turned out to be harmless.)
Haaretz reported that the soldiers, “who breached the army’s rule against using civilians as human shields during war, will be tried for violating their authority and for inappropriate conduct. An Israeli military official said the soldiers could face up to three years in jail.”
Two other Givati soldiers have already been charged with using a credit card they found during the siege.
Yediot Aharonot reports:
More than 30 probes have been launched against soldiers since the Gaza offensive ended in the beginning of 2009. Half of the cases have been closed by the military prosecution, while the other half are nearing their termination and await a decision on whether indictments will be filed.
A special team led by Lieutenant-Colonel Gil Maoz, who heads the military police’s southern district, is conducting investigations into claims regarding unlawful fire, injuring and endangering of innocent civilians, and disobeying orders.
Dozens of officers and soldiers have been summoned to give testimony or receive warning at the military police’s headquarters in recent months, some of them already having been discharged from the IDF.
A military official said the testimonies had revealed other infractions, some committed by commanders. “In places where the incident exceeds the boundaries of reason we will file indictments,” he said.
“But we can clearly…
Read More » Comments (0) »
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 1:27 PM | Stand For Israel
"informing, equipping and mobilizing individuals and churches to support the
State of Israel"
State of Israel"
Recent Posts
U.S. closes embassy in Syria
Remembering the victims of the 2002 terror war against Israel
It's Photo Friday!
Iran's a joke -- but the world's not laughing
Palestinians throw shoes at U.N. Secretary-General
