Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight. You can Find Your Fight wherever you buy books and you can learn more about it at jayruderman.com. Today, my guest is Eli Beer. Eli is the CEO of United Hatzalah, an international organization of volunteer medical emergency response teams. Hatzalah is Hebrew for saving and for Eli, that is the goal, to save as many people from medical emergencies as possible. Under Eli’s watch, many local Hatzalah groups organized under the umbrella of United Hatzalah and the organization has flourished and expanded since. United Hatzalah has worked around the world, providing assistance from Haiti to Nepal, the United States, Ukraine, and Israel, where it is based. Eli Beer, welcome to All About Change.

Eli Beer:

Thank you so much for having me.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you for being here. Eli, let me jump right into it. When people think of Hatzalah, they think of speed, they think of responding to patients as quickly as possible, and that’s an absolute must for you for whenever emergency happens. How have you managed to set and exceed such an aggressive standard?

Eli Beer:

Well, I used to be an EMT in the back of an ambulance when I was a young kid, and I used to see how we would go out to emergency calls to save someone who was choking and we would get stuck in traffic. And ambulances were invented to save people’s lives, but I realized that average response time of an ambulance in Jerusalem where I was a volunteer, was 17 minutes. And I knew that 17 minutes is impossible to save someone, and I said something has to be done. So, I focused my life really, to change that and make sure that immediate response by paramedics or EMTs will arrive in seconds. 90 seconds.

Jay Ruderman:

Okay. Let’s walk back. You have an experienced from when you’re very young. Maybe you can tell us about that.

Eli Beer:

When I was a little boy, I saw a bus blow up in front of my eyes, a number 12 bus coming back from school, and I saw people killed. I saw people were injured. I didn’t know what to do. I was too young, and when I grew up, I said, “I’m going to go save people’s lives and go volunteer in an ambulance.” That bad, terrible incident changed my life.

Jay Ruderman:

So where did the idea come from to change from an ambulance to essentially, what is a motorcycle with life-saving equipment on the back of it?

Eli Beer:

So, I used to see motorcycles passing us to deliver pizza, and I was stuck in traffic and I said, “Why are these guys delivering pizza arriving immediately when the pizza is still hot and we come with lights and sirens, we can’t go through traffic?” Because there’re narrow roads and when we get there, the patients are cold. And I said, “What if we turn an ambulance on a motorcycle, call it an ambucycle,” and put everything an ambulance has besides for a stretcher in the back of that ambucycle? We could get there in 90 seconds. And that was the game changer when I came up with this and all my friends said, “This is a brilliant idea.” [foreign language 00:03:39].

But we need to ask for permission from the police and from the government. I said, “No, no, no. In Israel, you never ask for permission. You first of all, do it, and then if you get caught, you ask for forgiveness.” The biggest obstacle we actually had was the ambulance services in Israel did not want to share calls with us, and we were stuck with ambucycles. These motorcycles with volunteers ready to go, but we had no medical emergency knowledge about what’s going on. If someone would call the ambulance, we would not know. So I decided to use some Israeli chutzpah and I went ahead and I bought police scanners in New York by Radio Shack and I used these scanners to listen in to the police and fire and ambulances. That’s how we knew emergencies happening and that’s what we used to save lives, and that was 1989.

Jay Ruderman:

Let’s back up a little bit. Your service Hatzalah depends on volunteers. How do you get the volunteers and how do you train the volunteers?

Eli Beer:

Well, it’s amazing to see how many people want to do good and we get requests from everywhere. When I started, I used to go from neighborhood to neighborhood in Jerusalem, tell people about it, and people my age more or less, and everyone said, “I want to join and how do we do the courses?” We used to then pay for people to train us and slowly, slowly we got our own trainers. Now, we train people every day. It’s a long process. Everyone has a job. This is volunteeringly, so we have to find a time where to train them. It’s usually twice a week. It takes about 200 hours over a few months, and once they finish that, they get fully licensed to be an EMT and they could go ahead and start saving lives.

Jay Ruderman:

One of the things that I’m impressed about you is your entrepreneurism, that you see a problem, you find a solution, and not only do you train people and give them these ambucycles, but they take them home with them. So wherever they’re living in the country, they can just walk out their door, get onto the ambucycle and get to the closest emergency. Usually, organizations are very bureaucratic and they want to keep everything in one place and the volunteer or the employee has to get to their place of work in order to access the ambulance or whatever and then get to the emergency. Tell me the thought process where you said “No, it makes more sense to keep it at their home.”

Eli Beer:

That’s exactly the idea of United Hatzalah. It’s actually using volunteers within their communities and creating an emergency response within communities, which it’s really the grassroots of life-saving, taking random people from everywhere. And the beauty about this is, I believe in order to get to 90 seconds, we need to take people who are Jewish and non-Jewish in Israel, religious and secular. So these people come from all backgrounds and we have a network.

If you think about Uber, it’s very much like Uber. Any volunteer who goes home is on call, they go to work, they’re on call, they go to vacation, they’re on call. We actually locate every single volunteer by a special app that we have on their special rugged phones that we give them so we could know where they are and within three seconds they get an alert, something nearby them is happening. So they jump out of work or home or synagogue and they run to save people’s lives. And the idea of having that ambucycle with them, that’s the brilliant idea because many organizations have volunteers, but they tell the volunteers when they have a fire, you come to the station, we’ll all leave together in a fire truck. We say no when you have a fire or someone is choking, run straight to the fire or to that person choking. So save that person.

Jay Ruderman:

First of all, that’s amazing. And I want to talk to you a little bit more about how you’ve shared this technology because this is a volunteer service. You’re not making money off of this. How have you shared this technology with other countries about how they can respond quicker to emergencies in their communities?

Eli Beer:

Well, I speak all around the world about this and I get many people who stop me and say, “How do we do this in my country? In my city?” I’ll give you an example. I was in Miami speaking in a synagogue at Bell Harbor, a person comes over to me, he says, “I live in Panama City.” Panama City, you could stand in traffic for three hours and not move. It’s like normal. And he said, “When you call for an ambulance, you’re dead.” So, he says, “Can we do it there?” I said, “Yes. Do you have people who have some chutzpah?” Because we’re doing this from the grassroots, we’re not coming from the government, we’re coming from the people. So, he said, “Yes, we have some people chutzpah.” I said, “Okay, so let’s get them together and I’ll come to Panama.” I was never there and I met incredible people.

Over 100 people registered right away to join in, and they started there. Many countries around the world who started this, they found out that this is changing their communities. The first layer of response before Hatzalah exists, people would wait for an ambulance sometimes 30, 40, 50 minutes, an hour, and it was impossible to save them if they were in a life-threatening emergency. Today, your next door neighbor or some random person will jump into your home and do that initiative work, the first important stabilization, and then when an ambulance arrives, they could take them to the hospital. But the most important thing is actually to save someone, to stabilize them, to prevent brain damage. How many people get saved and die months later or years later and their family suffers so much? If someone would’ve arrived 30 seconds earlier, that could have been different.

The problem is, when someone calls for help and they see their child not breathing, God forbid, it takes them two minutes to explain where they are and what the story is. Sometimes you call 911 and they could ask you for three, four or five minutes a lot of questions, and we see that such bureaucratic and a waste of time. Who cares how old, if the boy is four years old or seven years old, if the kid is not breathing, just send someone to save that kid. Or if someone’s having a heart attack, what does it matter their medical history? Now, we need to send people to them.

The first thing we do in Israel, in United Hatzalah, we actually ask for the address. Now, if they don’t know the address, if we have a question mark about their location, we send them a link within a second, they could press it and we see their address, we see their exact address, we see their phone opens up and the camera opens up, and now, we see what’s going on. We see the location, the volunteers get the exact location and we see an image. So we could tell that mother what to do. We could tell that person who’s seeing the accident, how to stop the bleeding until we arrive. So this is a revolution in life-saving.

Jay Ruderman:

You talked about a term, chutzpah. That we have, chutzpah that we just… And I’m trying, I’m racking my brain and saying, what is the definition of chutzpah? How would you define that to an English-speaking audience?

Eli Beer:

It’s an incredible Israeli word. It’s a Jewish word. When you hear and know, you say, “I don’t accept that and I want to do it anyways and I’ll find a way how to do it.” And I think chutzpah is what really defines us as Israelis, as Jews. That’s how we create so many companies and organizations in Israel. And when I heard a no from the ambulance, when I went to see the head of the union of the ambulance service in Jerusalem, and I told him my idea and I was 16 and a half years old, he threw me out of the building. He said, “Never come back.” He said, “When someone calls for help, they’re going to get an ambulance. No one’s just coming there randomly coming to save people.” And I said, “But how many people die waiting for us? I was there, I saw it. I had a login of all the calls we went out to. Average response time was 17 minutes.” He threw me out of the building.

So I was stuck and I said, “I’m going to make this happen no matter what.” And thank God we had an undercover place. It was unbelievable how we started. I said to people, “We just come, we arrive. We’re just going to come as regular Israelis.”

Jay Ruderman:

So how does it work? Like okay, you guys are working on a patient and another ambulance, whether it’s your ambulance or whether it’s another company’s ambulance, shows up. By now, people are expecting you guys to be the first ones on the scene. So how does it work together now?

Eli Beer:

It took us time, but we actually are aligned with over 100 ambulance companies in Israel. Now, we are the only ones who come for free. We’re volunteers, totally 100% volunteers on the road. So we’re not there to compete with them about the transport. We’re there to get there for the first seconds until they arrive. So, it could be they have so many different ambulances, big ones and the national one and small ones, when they get a call, they actually share the calls with us and we could get there faster by just knowing the location.

When we arrive, we work together with them. Sometimes, they would arrive first and we would show up and we would work with them. And if they don’t need our help, we’ll go back to work. It’s like we’re there just to fill in the gap and help out. And if we can’t help out, if they don’t need us, we will just go back because our job is not really the transport, although we do that sometimes because we need to. We actually prefer to just come and do the first initiative work and then ambulances show up and take them to the hospital.

Jay Ruderman:

Not only is Hatzalah dependent on support that it’s free, that people are supporting the organization, but you also have this amazing group of thousands and thousands of volunteers. Can you talk about the network? Who is the type of person that works with Hatzalah that will leave their job or their family and rush into a situation of need?

Eli Beer:

I could say it’s a variety of people, and I love the fact that we have Arabs and Jews working together in Israel, which is fascinating to see, but even more, to see the Jews working together. We have ultra-Orthodox and secular and Christians and Druze working all around the country in one organization all wearing this orange vest. And these volunteers, some of them are plumbers, some of them are electricians, lawyers, business people. Most of these people are either independent or their jobs allow them to leave anytime of the day or night. We would interview people and say, “So what happens if you get a call at two o’clock in the afternoon? Could you respond?” And if they say, “Yes, I have to ask my boss.” And so we say, “Okay, first thing is get permission from your employee.” You must have a job. We’re not going to take people who doesn’t have a job.

We want people who are stable, who know what they’re doing. We want usually people over 21. So they finish their army service and once they join us and they have the training, they’re on call 24/7. So, I find itself fascinating. Sometimes I go out to calls and meet people. I say, “What do you do for a living?” Oh, I’m a garbage truck driver. And he say, “How did he get here?” And he says, “Oh, look, here’s my garbage truck. It’s right here. I responded with the garbage truck.” And the city allows him to have a defibrillator and a trauma kit in the back of his truck. This guy, he was telling me, he just saved the baby’s life because he was right around the corner and he arrived with his garbage truck. These are the heroes that I see and I love.

Jay Ruderman:

I think at a time where Israel gets so much negative press in the world, I don’t think people understand Israeli society. And maybe you can talk about the story about your father. When your father was in trouble and who responded to save your father.

Eli Beer:

My father was a great man and he loved Israel. I had six brothers and sisters, and I was the youngest in the family. I gave my father the most trouble and ended up that he was in the back of an ambulance. My father actually owned a cemetery in Israel. He was a partner in a cemetery. So my father told me as a joke all the years, he meant it as if… He was a [inaudible 00:17:11]. And he said, “Oh, Eli, you’re going to kill my business with Hatzalah.” He was joking, of course. And one day my father’s neighbors runs over to my house on Shabbat afternoon and he says, “Your father’s not feeling well.” I run over to his house, I find my father collapsing in front of my eyes and I froze. I forgot everything I knew about saving lives. I couldn’t do anything. I loved my father.

And all of a sudden, out of the nowhere, one of the neighbors who’s a rabbi who volunteers for United Hatzalah Rabbi Rosenberg runs in and he says, “Eli, move aside. I’ll take over.” And he starts CPR on my father, but we needed a defibrillator. And a few minutes later, like two minutes later, a taxi driver stops by. It was an Arab volunteer of United Hatzalah, a taxi driver. He got the call. He didn’t know it was my father, of course, just showed up with a defibrillator. And they started working on my father. And within nine minutes after he got three shocks with his defibrillator, he got his life back. His heartbeat came back to him. And in the hospital, my father was told by the doctor that your son saved your life. And my father looks at me and he was so proud. He said, “I’m sorry for all these years for joking around with you.” I said, “It’s fine.” He could continue joking. And my father lived for a few more years and it was wonderful years.

Jay Ruderman:

I hear these stories of Arabs saving Jews, Jews saving Arabs. I’m sure you know so many of these stories. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how integrated your group of volunteers is.

Eli Beer:

The thing I’m so proud of is the fact that we are united, and the reason I added the name to Hatzalah, I added United Hatzalah is because of the fact that I have volunteers who come from all sectors. I remember I getting a phone call before we had any Arab volunteers from a person called Mohammed, and he said to me, “Why don’t I join the United Hatzalah?” He told me that his father died waiting for help for over an hour. His father was waiting for an ambulance, and he said, “I want to join you and I want to save lives.” And when I met him, I saw he was really sincere.

He said, “I live in Jerusalem, East Jerusalem. By us, we wait for a very long time for help, but Hatzalah is in West Jerusalem and you come immediately, how could you do the same by us?” So I said, “Join, but you have to bring 25 friends with you.” And he actually joined with 25 friends, and today, we have 750 Arab volunteers. And to see the Hasidim and the secular Jews and the men and women and the Arabs all together, it brings me a lot of joy. And the reason we succeed is because this is Israel. The truth is, this is the real story of Israel.

Jay Ruderman:

Is there a particular story of a volunteer that stuck with you? Someone that just stands out?

Eli Beer:

This Mohammed volunteer of ours is very active. And we gave him an ambucycle. A friend of mine, Mark Gerson, donated that ambucycle in honor of his rabbi, and we gave it to this Mohammed, and he was driving this ambucycle. And one day, he gets a call about a woman giving birth in a gas station. And he got there in like 40 seconds and he saw this rabbi with a long beard and his big [foreign language 00:20:22], he’s yelling for help. His wife is in the car giving birth, and he runs over. This is on Ramadan, the end of Ramadan. He has to be home that time. His wife is waiting for him to take care of the kids. And he sees the situation, he sees the baby is choking from the umbilical cord around the neck, so he helps release the baby and he saved the baby’s life.

The husband, he fainted when he saw that happen, he thought the baby died. And when he woke up, another volunteer of United Hatzalah was treating him. And he says to him, “What happened to my baby? Is the baby okay?” And he said, “No, your baby’s fine. You have a baby boy.” And he runs over to Muhammad, not knowing who he is and what’s his name and nothing, not his background starts hugging and kissing him. And he says, “I want you to be the sandek next week and the bris, you should be the Godfather in the ceremony, in the Jewish ceremony, the bris.” So he says, “No, no, no, no. We don’t allow in United Hatzalah to pay for the service.” And this is like a big payout. We don’t take tips, so you can’t give me any Bris. He says, “No, please, please come.”

And they’re fighting and he says, “You know what? In this case, because you want to give me something, I’m not going to accept the sandek, but send my wife flowers, a little bouquet of flowers. That would be enough.” And he’s fighting with him. And he said, “No, no, no, I want you to come. No bouquet. I want you to come.” And he said, “No, just a small bouquet. Write a little note that I saved your baby’s life. That would be enough for me.” And then he says, “No, I want you to come. I’m insisting.” He says, “I’m not taking it.” So he says, “You know what?” The rabbi says to Muhammad, “I see you’re such a humble person and I see you’re a good person. You don’t want to come. It’s fine. Just give me a name. I want name my son after you.”

And now, Muhammad’s thinking to myself, “How do I get out of this one?” And he says, “Listen, I’ll tell you the truth. A little bouquet of flowers is enough for me.” He says, “No, no, what’s your name?” So he says, “I’ll tell you, not everyone in United Hatzalah is Jewish. I’m not Jewish, I’m Muslim and my name is Muhammad. I’m not sure this name Muhammad will do too well in Yeshiva.” So, the rabbi looks at him and he says, “What’s your address? I want to send you a huge bouquet of flowers.” And I heard that story from Muhammad and he told me that story and I said, “This is the essence of this organization.” We do good. We don’t want anything in return. And that guy, Muhammad and the rabbi, became very close friends and he used to hang out with them. And it was just a nice thing to see that we building bridges in Israel by saving lives.

Jay Ruderman:

Let me turn to you in your own experience, because you got COVID, it was pretty bad and you turned from the helper to the helpee, and thank God you’re recovered and you’re healthy. But how did that experience, maybe you could talk a little bit about it, but how did it shape your work in terms of how you think about helping others?

Eli Beer:

It’s weird. You’re putting this up, this question to me now because it’s five years since the day I was intubated when I got sick with COVID. Five days today, I was actually in the hospital, it was a Friday afternoon actually when the doctor said, “We have no choice but to induce you into coma.” This is the beginning of COVID. And people actually did not know a lot of people in a coma, on a ventilator. And I was one of the first. When I woke up, it was a month later and I had a 5% chance recovery. The doctor said I had a 5% chance to be saved. And when I woke up, I realized that I should do more. And one of the things I learned from there is to be humble when we treat people. Very, very humble, meaning, I always told my people, our volunteers of United Hatzalah is, “When you treat someone, you should sit or lay down on their floor to be in their level of their eyes.” Because when someone’s laying on the floor or laying on a bed, when you’re standing up above them, they feel intimidated.

And I learned by being in the hospital, dying and then waking up and for a month, wearing a diaper, and I couldn’t even move. I lost my muscles. I couldn’t really go to bathroom, so I was wearing a diaper. And I realized that when a nurse came to me and she was standing all the way up there, I felt so embarrassed. And then a doctor in the hospital, Maria, she actually wore Star of David. So I connected to her and she was holding my hand and she went down to look at my eyes and I felt I needed to make sure when I come back to life and go back to saving lives, not only that we go down, we actually go one inch lower and make the patient feel like the most important person in the room. And that’s what we do now. And that’s what I learned from COVID. We arrive quickly, we treat everyone equally and in the most respectful way. And I love that.

Jay Ruderman:

First of all, I did not know this was five years from the day that you got COVID and that you went into the hospital. I’m overjoyed that you’re healthy and you’re with us and you survived.

Eli Beer:

Thank you.

Jay Ruderman:

That is an important lesson because I think it is intimidating to be in a hospital or be in a medical emergency and have all these people around you and you’re scared. Eli, you have so many lessons that you have imparted to the world. We can learn from your success and from your entrepreneurism. Let me just ask you as a final question, Hatzalah, at the heart of it is a Jewish and Israeli organization and it shaped the identities of the organization. But now, in a reality where there’s so much anti-Semitism around the world, how has that impacted your organization?

Eli Beer:

Well, I actually speak to people about the lies that people implant in the world about Jews and about Israel. And I show them United Hatzalah as an example. And I always said, if you want to fight anti-Semitism, you have to tell them the truth. We go with these vests, with the Israeli flag and the United Hatzalah symbol. We travel around the world. I’ve been to Morocco for the last earthquake they had there. We’ve been to Turkey almost two years ago. Turkey had a big earthquake with thousands of victims, tens of thousands of victims. Our teams were the first teams to arrive.

Speaker 1:

For more, let’s speak with Linor Attias, director of communications for United Hatzalah Emergency Services, and she also is there in Gaziantep. And Linor, give us a sense of the situation you’re confronting there in Turkey.

Linor Attias:

We just landed a few hours ago from Israel with United Hatzalah delegation, our rescue mission here with medical of doctors, paramedics, medics and rescue people, engineers who wish to assist wherever is necessary.

Eli Beer:

We came there and we were helping and we saved lives there wearing our Hatzalah vest. And Israeli army was there too. So we did a tremendous say, [foreign language 00:27:48], which is our way of respecting God. And we came there and we were showing the goodness of Israel. We just have to show who we are and hope people understand to be different, but we’re not going to be able to fix it. It’s going to be very, very hard because it’s 5,000 years old or 3,000 years old.

Jay Ruderman:

Eli, I just want to thank you for being my guest on All About Change and may you go from strength to strength.

Eli Beer:

It’s great to be by you, and I hope to… We should do this once in a while. So many updates in the future.

Jay Ruderman:

God willing. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to All About Change. Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. Stay tuned for our next episode featuring Ashlyn So. Spread the word or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We’d really appreciate it. That’s all for now. I’m Jay Ruderman, and we’ll see you soon with another episode of All About Change.