Good Monday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on a new security initiative in Brooklyn and feature an opinion piece from Rabbi Andrew Ergas about the importance of Hebrew. Also in this newsletter: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jason Kunzman and Rabbi Matthew H. Simon. We’ll start with a United Hatzalah team spending Rosh Hashanah helping Moroccan villages hit by this month’s earthquake.
A team of 14 United Hatzalah volunteers — doctors, paramedics, nurses and others — spent Rosh Hashanah traveling to remote villages in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, treating over 100 people each day, some of whom have been without medical attention since before the devastating earthquake struck the area on Sept. 8, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
“There are usually around 300-500 people in the village. We treat around 100-200 people a day. Some of them haven’t seen a doctor in months. There are people who lost family, sometimes parents, sometimes children,” Samuel Arrouas, the director of United Hatzalah France, who is part of the delegation, told eJP this morning.
The United Hatzalah mission traveled to Morocco days after the earthquake, which has killed more than 2,800 people, injured thousands more and affected some 300,000, according to the most recent United Nations statistics. In recent days, the United Hatzalah team, which is based in Marrakech, has been traveling from village to village, based on the recommendations of and in coordination with local authorities. They set up a two-tent “foldable” clinic and provide whatever medical care that they can.
When Arrouas spoke to eJP just after 7 a.m. local time, he was already hours into his journey to the village of Askaouen, south of Marrakech, where the team would be working on Monday and possibly on Tuesday. “There has been no medical assistance in that place since the beginning,” he said. “There will be 300-400 people waiting for us. We may sleep there to avoid the trips back and forth.”
While the team is primarily focused on providing medical assistance, when members have free time, they make an effort to interact with the local residents, particularly the children. “We give them toys, balloons,” he said. “There are a lot of orphans, who have lost parents and siblings and have no one to go to. They are very thankful. You give them a small present and you can see the stars in their eyes.”
Arrouas said the team worked through the holiday as normal. Though most members of the United Hatzalah delegation are Jewish, there is also one Arab Israeli doctor and a Muslim paramedic from the United States who joined the team. Arrouas said he also hired local French nurses to help them as well.
“A small part of the team had enough time to pray,” he said, “but the team that was in the field — we prayed for them.”
Read the full report here.
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