Kudos to Laniado Hospital Sanz Medical Centre Natanya
THE SPIRIT of people who create institutions and movements designed to help and to heal, often remains, long after the founders are gone.
A case in point is the Laniado Medical Centre in Netanya, which was founded by Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, who was also the first Klausenberger Rebbe. The hospital is administered by Klausenberger Hassidim.
Halberstam’s wife and 11 children were murdered by the Nazis. Of his extended family of 150 souls, he was the only survivor. After the war, he lived for a few years in New York, and had seven more children – five daughters and two sons.
After coming to Israel, he kept a promise that he had made to himself during the war and built a not-for-profit hospital, in which all the staff are committed to maintaining human dignity and saving human life. The ongoing battle with the COVID pandemic has brought out the best not only in Laniado staff, but in medical staff in hospitals and clinics throughout Israel. At Laniado, there is an annual Am Ehad (One People) award in recognition of selfless service to every patient. Many staff members were considered deserving, but none more so than senior social worker in the emergency and trauma department Hadas Rucham, a married woman with two young children, who many colleagues consider a real-life heroine.
Rucham, who is also a volunteer in United Hatzalah’s Psychotrauma & Crisis Response Unit, in early July, without thinking twice, put all her other responsibilities on the back burner and traveled to Florida to the site of the collapsed Champlain Towers building, where so many people were killed and injured, and joined in efforts to help the local Jewish community.
Her actions were directly in line with anything that Halberstam would have done or recommended. A perfect example of One People.
Article from The Jerusalem post dated 1st September 2021