Good Tuesday morning.
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on increased security measures at Hillels and other Jewish campus institutions, as well as the Jewish Priorities Conference at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. We feature an opinion piece from Mark Goldfeder. Also in this newsletter: Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Seth Klarman and John Hess.We’ll start with American doctors volunteering in Israeli hospitals.
Within a day of hearing about the massacres in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Dr. Allan Tissenbaum was ready to come to Israel to volunteer in a hospital or with a military medical unit. Unlike thousands of other American doctors who have registered to volunteer, Tissenbaum, an orthopedic surgeon from Pittsburgh, along with roughly three dozen other doctors, nurses and paramedics came to Israel last week, training and waiting and hoping that they won’t be needed as part of the Emergency Volunteer Program, an initiative that in the past has mostly focused on bringing American firefighters to Israel, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
In light of the scale of the devastation in Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks and the potential for further stresses on the Israeli medical system, EVP began working to bring over American volunteers, something it had never done before, save for a handful of paramedics who came to Israel during the 2014 war.
“On Saturday, as soon as we heard about the massacre, we came to EVP and got a notification that this is going to happen and it was just a question of when and where we would be going,” Tissenbaum told eJP.
Even as Israeli doctors and other medical professionals have been called up to the reserves, the country’s healthcare system has not yet faced a significant staffing shortage as hospitals have postponed elective surgeries and worked to release non-urgent patients. As a result, the volunteers have not had much work to do, which Tissenbaum said they consider to be a good thing.
“No one has lost their enthusiasm. We came to do a job but we’re hoping not to have to do a job,” he told eJP. “We want to do something, but we also don’t want to do something because us doing something implies injured Israelis, injured soldiers, injured civilians.”
Read the full report here.
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