Netanya is a resort city. It's a place where people come to
get away from it all, and in better times Laniado Hospital
reflected the relaxing seaside environment, providing superb
medical care consistent with a community hospital. But things
have changed.
Netanya has become a focus of terror with the second largest
number of suicide terror bombings in Israel after
Yerushalayim. And Laniado has adjusted to its new role,
pioneering in the 21st century version of emergency and
trauma care. It was an eye-opener for Canadian doctors and
dentists who had rarely, if ever, seen the devastating
effects of nail-packed bombs.
The visiting medical professionals were part of a non-
religious solidarity mission from Toronto, and this was the
first time they had visited a religious hospital, staffed
almost exclusively by Torah-observant doctors and nurses. The
net result was a tremendous kiddush Hashem.
In addressing the group, Head Trauma Nurse, Lydia Lanxner,
emergency preparedness coordinator of the hospital, delivered
a spellbinding lecture on mass-disaster medical care -- a
field in which she has become a world-recognized authority.
From the minute she began speaking until the end of her
lecture forty-five minutes later, everyone in the room was
either crying or trying not to.
"We Israelis are not smarter," said Mrs. Lanxner, who was
recently invited to share her knowledge with senior American
and British military personnel in a closed conference held in
South Africa last month. "The only difference between us in
Israel and you in Canada is that here, we've had to deal with
terrorism for years and years. Meaning, that the training
that I will show you is not something that we do because
we're good people. Rather, we know that we're preparing for
something that is going to happen to us right here, right
under our doorsteps, when we least expect it. Netanya is only
5 miles from the Palestinian city of Tulkarem. It's a very
narrow bottleneck area of the country. A terrorist can walk
here in less than one hour."
One of the ways Laniado contends with terrorist attacks is by
mobilizing the religious neighborhood, as well as the
bochurim who learn in an adjacent yeshiva. She said
that on the night of the Seder, when a terrorist
disguised as a religious woman detonated himself in the
crowded dining room of the Park Hotel, the Torah-observant
community came out in force to help carry stretchers and
donate blood. She added that the yeshiva bochurim have
been trained to help out in case of chemical or biological
warfare in the upcoming war with Iraq.
The biggest number of victims, Mrs. Lanxner said, came to
Laniado following the terrorist bombing of the Sharon Mall.
"They started adding nails to bombs, [and] ever since then
we've seen a lot of nails in victims. You know that a nail
will fly during a blast with the head of the nail in front,
so what you see is little needle points sticking out of the
victims' skins." Doing this is a war crime according to
international law.
The Canadian physicians listened on with a measure of
steadily increasing awe for Mrs. Lanxner and her Torah-
observant peers at Laniado. After the lecture, several
members of the Canadian contingent discussed among themselves
the positive impact that religious observance can have on the
quality of medical care offered to patients.
While the hospital is uniquely geared to disasters, Laniado
is also in the forefront of preventive solutions. Dr. Shlomo
Bulvik, chairman of Laniado's hematology department explained
how he developed an innovative and daring procedure to treat
West Nile Virus. This technique now serves as the basis for
the pre-Iraqi war inoculations of the entire population of
Israel against smallpox. Without his discovery, such large-
scale inoculation would not be possible.
Dr. Claude Picard, chairman of the orthopedic department,
explained that terrorists are walking chemical, biological
bombs because they are often intentionally infected with
diseases such as Hepatitis B before they are sent on their
deadly missions.
The fact that Laniado's trauma unit is never closed is not
only a sign of the times, but also a legacy of the hospital's
founder, Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam zt'l, the
Klausenberger Rebbe. After he survived the ordeals of the
concentration camps, he vowed to dedicate his life to
establishing institutions to benefit the Jewish people. He
proceeded to spend the following decades endeavoring to build
a hospital in Eretz Yisroel.
In 1975, after years of planning, Rav Halberstam zt'l
established Laniado Hospital in Netanya. He developed a
set of Founding Principles to guide the operation of the
Hospital focusing on the needs of the patient.
Today, his legacy lives on. The Rebbe lived to see Laniado
develop from its primitive beginnings into a major medical
center with the opening of the new building in 1995 and the
transfer of the Surgery and Maternity Departments to their
new state-of-the-art premises. He died shortly after, and his
eldest surviving son, HaRav Zvi Elimelech Halberstam, became
the new Sanz Rebbe in Israel, as well as President of the
Hospital.
