been injured, I try to distract myself. Someone else might have jumped out the window, but me? I may be deaf and blind, but I’m not retarded. Life is too important to me now; I try to see the glass as half full. I’m alive.”
The doctors struggled for five days to save the life of Orly Virani, a survivor of the massacre at the Matza restaurant in Haifa in March 2002. They were afraid she wasn’t going to make it. “My body was full of shrapnel,” Orly said, “and they told me that a person with those kinds of injuries had less than a 20 percent chance of survival. At that time, no one talked about the possibility of getting pregnant and having a child, but I knew that I would survive. I fought for my life. It is a great victory.”
Orly’s story is very similar to that of another miraculous survivor. In June 2002, a terrorist entered the home of the Shabo family in the settlement of Itamar and fired a hail of bullets, killing Rachel Shabo and three of her children. Asael, nine years old, was hit by a series of bullets that took off his leg. Today he walks thanks to a sophisticated prosthesis designed in the United States. At first he was depressed and didn’t want to hear about wearing an artificial limb. Then he met Shlomo Nimrod, a disabled veteran who wears a prosthesis designed to allow him to run and play sports (similar to the one used by the South African Olympic champion Oscar Pistorius). Nimrod convinced Asael to have a prosthesis like his own made. “Dad, I can run on two legs,” Asael told his father before returning to Israel.
Since a Palestinian rocket hit her clinic in Ashkelon, Dr. Mirela Siderer lives with a piece of shrapnel an inch and a half long lodged in the left side of her back. The doctors say it is too close to the spinal cord to be removed. “I felt something like a ball of fire whirling inside of me, and all of my teeth were knocked out,” Siderer told the United Nations commission set up to investigate the Israeli counteroffensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in January 2009. “What was my offense? That I am a Jew living in Ashkelon? I studied medicine to help people all over the world, and I have also helped many women from Gaza.”
A volunteer from Zaka, David Dvir, removed a young woman who had just died from the ambulance to make room for an injured person. “And then I recognized her: it was my friend Nava Applebaum. She was twenty years old; she was supposed to get married the next morning.” Her father, Dr. David Applebaum, had saved dozens of people torn apart by the bombs. He had immigrated from Cleveland more than twenty years earlier along with his wife, who like him was a scholar of the Torah. After directing Magen David Adom in Jerusalem, Dr. Applebaum founded an innovative emergency care center. The Knesset honored him for helping the injured in an attack on King George Street, before the flames had even been extinguished.
“His entire life was dedicated to saving the lives of others. Thousands of Jerusalem residents owe their lives to him.”
Dr. Applebaum had just made a presentation at a conference on terrorism in New York, two years after the September 11 massacre. Israelis have been advising American hospitals on how to prepare for a terror-related mass casualty event, and the country has sent and received international delegations for hospital visits. In New York, Dr. Applebaum had shown slides illustrating how it is possible to treat “forty-four injured people in twenty-eight minutes,” as he had done after one attack in Jerusalem. Then he returned home immediately and took his daughter Nava to Cafe Hillel, the day before her wedding was supposed to take place. Both of them were killed by the explosion at the cafe, along with five other people. Nava had just finished her national service with an organization that helps children who have cancer. “She will be an eternal bride,” said her brother.
One year after the attack, fifteen American doctors emigrated to Israel in the name of Dr. Applebaum. It is one of the many legacies of this extraordinary doctor. His coworkers call him “revolutionary,” a man who was always first to help the victims. Todd Zalut was his assistant for many years at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. “David was the kind of doctor everyone dreams of becoming,” Zalut tells us. “During the 1980s, David was the first volunteer doctor to work in the ambulances. He slept with a defibrillator next to his bed in case of emergency. He helped many to stay alive. At the end of the 1980s, he was frustrated because the Israeli health care system couldn’t guarantee standard treatment for all. Regardless of their ability to pay, David gave everyone access to his intensive care unit. No waiting, quality medicine, and helping the patient as if the doctor were a friend.” These efforts eventually led to the creation of the David Applebaum Memorial Foundation for the Advancement of Emergency Medicine.
“Everyone had his cell phone number; they called him in the middle of the night, on Shabbat and holidays. He was always there to help. Sometimes he took the patient to America simply because it was too risky to operate on him in Israel,” recalls Zalut. He describes Dr. Applebaum as “more than a boss—he was a mentor, he was a friend. We will continue to fight for every patient, Jewish or Arab. And we will win this fight, because it is just and because we had a good teacher.”
Dr. Margalit Prachi says of Applebaum, “I worked with him for seventeen years. The patients’ families adored him. When he became head of the department, he revolutionized everything: he eliminated inefficiencies and organized a system for gathering family members quickly at the same hospital, children with their parents, in case of attacks or major catastrophes. It is difficult to express what he meant to us.”
Dr. Yonatan Halevy, director of Shaare Zedek, remarks, “The fact that a man, three days before his daughter’s wedding, would go to America to teach others what he had learned about medical preparation for a terrorist attack—a field in which the Israeli hospitals unfortunately have extensive experience—speaks of the stature of this person and of his complete dedication to both his work and his family.” Professor Halevy was Applebaum’s supervisor for many years. “David was an extraordinary human being,” he says. “Outside of his medical profession, he was known as a scholar and a man of vision; he cared for every human person with respect. In the field of emergency medicine, David was a pioneer and developed many of the systems that are used in emergency rooms. He also organized a network for clinics that don’t have access to the resources of the big hospitals. David wanted every patient to receive equal compassion and attention, always. No case was ever too much for him, and he stuck to this until the last days of his life.”
Asked how Applebaum reacted to suicide attacks, Halevy replies, “David lived a few minutes from our hospital, so he was always one of the first to arrive. His presence helped to manage the chaos that follows such an attack. Although these attacks are sensational in their scope and nature, it is essential for a doctor to remain calm and give everyone the same attention. David always had the same level of compassion for the victims of attacks.”
Dr. Applebaum always showed the close connection between medicine and Judaism, says Todd Zalut. “David was a rabbi, and studied with one of the greatest rabbis of our time, Aharon Soloveitchik. David also taught at the seminary for women. He was an ardent Zionist who thought that Jews all over the world should come to Israel, the land that God gave to the Jewish people.”
Applebaum’s name has been placed alongside those of the great Jewish masters. According to Yonatan Halevy, “David was a teacher of religion, and, like Maimonides, he was also a doctor. Medicine and Halakhah, the Jewish law, complement each other. There is no doubt that David’s faith in the tradition and values of Judaism had a great impact on his role as a doctor, and in particular on the sense of compassion that he demonstrated to all.” His death was a tremendous loss for all of Israel. “There are no words to explain this tragedy. The irony is that he was killed in an attack, when he had helped many victims to recover after similar attacks. The medical community will never get over his death. He was a true giant, and his example inspires many students of medicine here in Israel and all over the world. His witness lives on in the Weinstock Department of Emergency Medicine here at the Shaare Zedek hospital.”
Applebaum’s father-in-law, Shubert Spero, said this at his funeral: “Dear David, you should have accompanied your daughter to the khupah (wedding canopy), and instead we are accompanying both of you to your final resting place.” Nava’s fiancé, Chanan, put the wedding ring on her finger, saying, “She will always be my wife.”