Some moments in life are hard to face. Others are downright
impossible:
It's one o'clock in the morning. A bus overturns on a lonely
stretch of road in the north of Israel. Most of the
passengers -- fifty women from the religious community of
Beit Shemesh -- sustain serious injuries. Two young mothers
are killed, mutilated beyond recognition. Who will identify
the victims? Keep track of where each one is hospitalized?
Inform their next of kin? Watch over the bodies until burial?
Support the bereaved families? Help with funeral
arrangements? There is no time to waste -- all of these vital
tasks must be completed without further delay. But who will
do them?
Later that same morning a ten-year-old child's persistent
stomachache is diagnosed as a cancerous growth. The physician
instructs the boy's parents to rush him to hospital and
initiate chemotherapy at once. Shocked by the horrible sound
of that dreaded word, the parents enter a state of emotional
paralysis and fail to respond coherently. They need guidance,
support -- someone to show them the way and to help them deal
with the countless technical details that a prolonged period
of hospitalization entails. Who will stay at home with their
other children during their absence? How will they transport
the sick child back and forth every day to the hospital for
treatments? The logistics alone are daunting.
Rabbi Chananya Chollak -- founder, chairman and driving force
of Ezer Mizion -- handles incidents such as these on a daily
basis. This is how it always is -- whenever tragedy strikes,
he is one the first people on the scene. And unfortunately,
it strikes much too often. "Most people don't realize how
many tzores happen in the course of a single day," he
says with a sigh.
A good indicator of the frequency of health-related crises is
Ezer Mizion's health hotline (02-500-2111), which operates 24-
hours a day, six days a week. Hundreds of requests for
assistance are received daily. The organization's staff,
consisting of two hundred employees and ten thousand
volunteers, handles most cases. Rabbi Chollak is called in to
deal only with the really difficult ones -- those that no one
else knows how to handle.
His illustrious career in alleviating the plight of the sick
began twenty years ago, when his father-in-law took ill and
was hospitalized for several months. He did not know it at
the time, but this difficult episode would prove to be a
major turning point in his life. One could say that his long
bedside vigils amounted to a crash course in human suffering.
The personal tragedies he saw unfolding in that gloomy
hospital ward etched an indelible impression on his heart,
and these experiences motivated him to launch a movement that
would shatter all past preconceptions of how much one can and
should do to help the sick.
One of the most memorable and poignant scenes from that
seemingly interminable period of hospitalization involves the
mother of a sick child. Noticing how anxious and concerned
she was over her child's health, Rabbi Chollak would always
make a point of offering her a few words of encouragement
when he arrived at the hospital in the mornings. One day he
entered the ward and was very surprised to see her mopping
the floors. "What are you doing?" he asked her in
confusion.
The woman looked up at him and blushed with embarrassment. "I
can't afford to buy lunch for myself, so the hospital made me
a special offer -- they'll supply me with free lunch in
exchange for mopping floors. I had no choice, so I
accepted."
Rabbi Chollak could not believe what he had just heard. The
poor woman was going through a major trauma; she deserved to
be treated better. Wasn't she suffering enough?
Another scene that stands out in his mind: a group of
disheveled, fatherless children showing up periodically to
visit their terminally ill mother. One day she passed away
and just as suddenly they stopped coming. How were they
managing? Rabbi Chollak kept wondering to himself. Who was
taking care of them? Such thoughts plagued his mind for days.
Finally, he made a personal resolution: to do everything in
his power to alleviate the plight of the sick.
Thus all of Ezer Mizion's numerous departments are
essentially outgrowths of some personal tragedy that Rabbi
Chollak encountered in the course of his work.
Take the Meals on Wheels program, for example. Today this
division supplies over 25,000 meals monthly to the elderly,
sick and invalid who are incapable of preparing their own
food, as well as to family members of hospitalized patients.
But it all began with the mother of that sick child, forced
to mop floors in order to earn her lunch.
Today Ezer Mizion maintains a fleet of 18 ambulances
available twenty-four hours a day to transport patients to
medical centers throughout Israel, but it all began when one
little boy stopped showing up for treatments because the bus
ride to the hospital proved too strenuous for him.
Oranit, Ezer Mizion's 22-room convalescent home for children
and family members requiring regular access to outpatient
treatments, has set new standards in the care of young cancer
patients. (Over one thousand children are afflicted with
cancer annually in Eretz Yisroel.) But the idea to build such
a facility germinated in Rabbi Chollak's mind when he found a
mother and her sick child spending the night in the waiting
room of an oncology ward. His genuine concern and desire to
alleviate the plight of others was the human catalyst that
sparked these projects.
Ezer Mizion offers a vast number of services in addition to
those mentioned above. To name just a few: volunteer
assistance to patients and their families; home care for the
elderly and disabled; summer camps and afternoon activities
for sick children; a state-of-the-art development center for
challenged children; free loans of expensive medical
equipment and sophisticated communication tools for people
afflicted with speech impairments; physiotherapy treatments;
a complete range of psychological services; and emergency
flights to medical centers throughout the world. All services
are provided free of charge, on a nondenominational basis, to
the full spectrum of Israeli society. (Some services are
available also to Americans visiting Eretz Yisroel.) The
organization subsists on private contributions, predominantly
from North America and Israel.
After meeting Rabbi Chollak one gets the distinct impression
that no project is too big or complex for him, yet the newly
established Blood and Bone Marrow Bank is by far the most
ambitious project he has launched to date. There are only two
others in the entire world.
The reason this project is so important is that a successful
bone marrow transplant can save the life of someone suffering
from life-threatening disease, yet finding donors is a very
difficult undertaking. Patients and potential donors of bone
marrow must share no less than twelve inherited genetic
factors, which means that finding a proper match is somewhat
like finding a needle in a haystack. The International Bone
Marrow Data Bank in Holland has compiled genetic profiles of
over four million potential donors, but this is not much help
to Jews, since the chances of finding genetic compatibility
between Jews and Gentiles are next to nil. Ezer Mizion's new
bone marrow data bank so far contains over twelve thousand
genetic profiles of Jews, and it has already helped save the
lives of three people.
The most prominent trait of the Ezer Mizion network is its
emphasis on personal care and quality. There is an air of
professionalism in every facet of the organization that is
universally ascribed to Rabbi Chollak. Facilities are
thoughtfully designed, generously equipped, immaculately
maintained and professionally staffed. This sense of genuine
care for the welfare of patients emerges from the
organization's upper echelons and filters all the way down to
the lowest links in the chain of command.
Rabbi Chollak is an intensely devoted person who has
virtually no life of his own -- suffice it to say that his
home is located literally next door to Ezer Mizion's bustling
Bnei Brak head office. From this command post he oversees the
activities of forty local branches in twenty-four cities.
Unlike many business executives who make a point of not
living in proximity to their offices, Rabbi and Mrs. Chollak
would not have it any other way. Blessed with twelve children
of their own, they have adopted four more -- orphans of
religious background who were on the verge of being placed in
secular institutions. Evidently the Chollaks do not make a
distinction between work and home -- both realms are viewed
as equally important opportunities to do chessed.
Rabbi Chollak usually goes to sleep past two a.m., yet he
rises at five-thirty in the morning. From shul he proceeds to
his most honored morning ritual -- assisting Maran HaRav
Eliezer Shach to wash and dress. The gedolei Torah
regard his role in the community so vital that they
hardly ever grant him permission to leave Eretz Yisroel.
HaRav Chaim Kanievsky deliberated for a very long time before
granting him permission to undertake a four-day journey to
America to assess new advances in the field of medicine.
Ezer Mizion is a living testimony to the power of giving. At
times like these, when so much hatred and criticism is being
directed against the religious community in Eretz Yisroel,
the work of Ezer Mizion shines all the brighter. It is truly
a Kiddush Hashem that all of us can take pride in.
