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Dry Bones

Editorial

Israel's Lifesavers

I

f not for Magen David Adorn (MDA),
no one could live in Sderot, the Israeli
town in the line of fire of Palestinian-
launched Kassam rockets. MDA paramed-
ics are on duty all day every day, racing to
the site of each missile attack by Hamas,
the Palestinian terrorist organization that
rules the Gaza Strip.
A shop owner said the paramedics are
literal lifesavers: "I can only sleep at night
because they are watching over us and
will be there if we need them."
MDA is Israel's national emergency,
blood and rescue service, exclusively
mandated by the Knesset. Recent efforts
have ranged from aiding Haiti after its
earthquake and Taiwan in the wake of
flooding, to helping the injured during
Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, to
extending care at the scenes of suicide
bombings.
In the north of Israel, citizens must
remain on high alert against Hezbollah
rocket fire; it was MDA that responded
when Katyushas peppered the north in
Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah.
The brave men and women who work
for MDA do so despite seeing the horrors
of terror and natural disaster.
What's more, MDA doesn't hide when
asked to assist people in dangerous
locales. There was the crew that entered
Hebron in the West Bank, met up with an
armored ambulance and then transported

a patient to a Jerusalem hospital.
Beside high-profile calls, MDA para-
medics also answer the call for every con-
ceivable medical emergency, from births
to heart attacks.
MDA notes how CNN shows MDA in
action amid the worst terrorist strikes
against Israelis, but that MDA's hero-
ics typically are lost in the larger story.
Further obscured are the hundreds of
thousands of U.S. donors who have helped
build the State of Israel over the past 70
years by supporting this brave corps of
elite rescue personnel with a worldwide
reputation for rapid response, expertise
and efficiency.
American Friends of Magen David
Adom (AFMDA) is the home for
Americans who embrace this Israeli ini-
tiative. AFMDA begins its eighth decade
dedicated to assuring the tens of millions
of dollars donated each year really do help
MDA maintain its critical work.
In the last five years, AFMDA has
raised $120 million to build new MDA
facilities, supply ambulances and emer-
gency vehicles, train first responders and
others, equip and modernize the nation's
blood services, and furnish a host of
emergency equipment and medical sup-
plies as well as protective gear for MDA
personnel, who don't hesitate even while
bombs, rockets and bullets target Israelis.
Israeli Independence Day, Yom

WITH TURKEY
AND EGYPT
CONDEMNING
US

HaAtzmaut, falls
on 5 Iyar, this
year April 19. It's
a clear reminder
that each dollar
given to AFMDA
affirms the soli-
darity between
Israelis and
Americans —
and their shared
commitment to
Israel's security
as a sovereign
state as well as to
pikuach nefesh,
the saving of
human life.
AFMDA sent
$21 million to
MDA in 2009.
Locally, the
Michigan-based
Dr. John J.
Mames Chapter
of the AFMDA
has raised $22 million for such basics as
bulletproof vests, paramedic scholarships
and defribrillators. It has donated 230
ambulances. The chapter also has funded
the Lillian L. and Allan I. Waller First
Aid Station and the Natalie and Manny
Charach Emergency Medical Center, both
in Ashdod.

ISRAEL AT 62

AND WITH
EUROPE
ANGRY WITH
US

NAPPY
BIRTHDAY
TO US!

AND SO MANY
AMERICAN SEWS
SUPPORTING THE
ANTI-ISRAEL
PRESSURE
THIS YEAR'S
PARTY WILL
BE A SMALL
FAMILY AFFAIR
SO . . .

!.'MAIM!

DryBonesBlog.com

Magen David Adom underescores for us
that while Palestinians culturally justify
embracing death as jihad fighters and
shields to please Allah, Jews cherish life
above all else. O

AFMDA is the U.S. fundraising arm of MDA. To

donate, call local chapter president Eva Mames:

(248) 353-0434.

Why Remember?

I

rarely faced anti-Semitism or thought
much about the Holocaust while I
grew up in Livonia in the 1960s. As
I sat on the bus going to Hebrew school,
I didn't ask why rocks were thrown at
our windows or wonder why my Hebrew
teacher, Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, seemed
so distant. Nor did I ask about the his-
tories of my Uncle Morey or his friends,
Aron and Frances Zoldan, all Holocaust
survivors living two blocks away, on St.
Francis Street.
Rabbi Rosenzveig, founder of the
Holocaust Memorial Center in Oakland
County, made sure in the next two decades
that Jews like me didn't take the Holocaust
for granted. I grew puzzled, then saddened
and later horrified how men could commit
such evil. In 1984, I took my future wife,
Judy, to the Holocaust Center the same day
I asked her to marry me. To truly experi-
ence joy, I reasoned, we must also under-
stand depths of sorrow and despair.

Over 25 years later, my
wife and I sat at Adat Shalom
Synagogue in Farmington
Hills, as she and her mother
read Kaddish for her father,
who died the morning before
the first Passover seder. The
day before Yom HaShoah,
Rabbi Aaron Bergman, the
son of Holocaust survivors,
admitted he understands the
Holocaust less than ever, more
stunned now by such unex-
plainably brutal cruelty. Yet he
also acknowledged believing
that all six million Jews who perished in
the Holocaust resisted in their own ways,
either physically, mentally or spiritually.
On the following day, on Sunday, April
11, Jews around the world gathered in
their own synagogues and communities
to remember Yom HaShoah and mourn
those we've lost. After the Sunday min-

yan service at Adat Shalom,
we listened to my old Livonia
neighbor, Aron Zoldan, a faith-
ful man who comes daily to
minyan service, talk about the
Holocaust. Unlike so many
survivors, Aron likes to talk
about his past, in English or
in Hebrew. He spoke about the
three-week trip on a cattle car
from Mukacheve to Auschwitz
with his parents and five sib-
lings; how everyone stood,
bunched tightly together, with
virtually no food, for the entire
three weeks. When they arrived, he and
two brothers were chosen to work at
Auschwitz while the other three siblings
and both his parents were chosen to die.
Aron admitted he survived once by
hiding in the crematorium's chimney
for two days. He spoke of the 60-mile
forced march from Mauthausen to

the Gunzkirchen camp, that prisoners
were liberated by the U.S. 71st Infantry
Division and that one of his brothers
could not survive the march, dying on
May 5, 1945. We heard Aron's anger at
FDR for turning away ships of Jews, how
he had been taken to Cyprus and eventu-
ally landed in Palestine and fought in
Israel's war of liberation.
After Aron's incredible stories, we lis-
tened to Chazzan Daniel Gross and the
Adat Shalom choir sing from his origi-
nal oratorio, entitled I Believe: A Shoah
Requiem. Gross' grandmother, Masha,
was the only member of her immediate
family to survive the Holocaust, unlike
her parents, eight brothers and sister and
other relatives who were "slaughtered in
Belzec."
The chazzan, acknowledging there is
no significant portion of liturgy dedi-

Remember on page 29

April 22 2010

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