The Healing Power of Diversity at Hadassah
Opinion piece by Michal Cotler-Wunsh
I recently spent ten days living in Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Kerem, as my 21-year-old daughter, injured in an accident, was with second-degree burns on significant areas of her legs and arm.
The experience as a mother was agonising – watching your child in excruciating physical and emotional pain, halting her young, active life. The roller-coaster ride – vacillating, sometimes within moments, between gratitude, regret, anger and sorrow – is a humbling human experience. In addition to the personal challenge, it provided an opportunity to experience and reflect on our complex, nuanced, moving and inspiring reality, encapsulating everything that is Israel.
In the elevator up to the seventh-floor burn/plastics ward, a Jewish surgeon speaks to his Arab colleague, while a religious family stands next to a group of young secular friends. On the seventh floor itself, the diversity of nurses and hospital staff is something that few believe exists, many ignore and some prefer to hide: a mosaic of religions, languages, cultures and backgrounds, all welcomed and focused on a singular goal: providing and receiving the best care by and for whomever the medical professional or patient might be – young and old, Jewish, Arab, Christian, Druze, who are at varying degrees of religious affiliation, practice and everything in between.
On that seventh-floor ward, overwhelmed by emotion at the gentle, compassionate care from an Arab doctor and nurses, ultra-Orthodox Jewish nurses and medical professionals from Russia and Ethiopia, New Jersey and Beit Hanina, my daughters’ eyes welled with grateful tears of joy and sadness, overwhelmed by the power of healing, expressing hope and concern for the opportunities and challenges of working side by side, caring by all, of all, for the benefit of all.
Down the hall, Noam Raz’s father, recovering from surgery, and loving family by his side, was notified of their beloved son’s death. The 47-year-old husband, son and father of six, a veteran officer of the elite police counterterrorism unit, was killed near Jenin in an operation to combat the terror that murdered 19 lives in 45 days. Realising the danger of mass exposure to germs, he accepted his wife’s thought-out plan and plea to remain in the hospital for the duration of the shiva mourning period.
Our temporary home thus housed a Shiva in which we were frequent drop-ins over the course of the week. As he mourned the loss of his son, he shared the understanding that he, they, did not really know what Noam did – and why his son had requested permission to change his surname to Raz: secret. And that his son, dedicated to his country, people, community and family, was full of endless known and hidden courage, love, modesty and commitment.
As Shiva on the seventh floor brought people from all over Israeli society to mourn with a grieving father, hospital staff worked together with military personnel to ensure smooth medical and technical elements during the week. When news came in of medical teams attacked by incited rioters at sister hospital Hadassah Mount Scopus, the ward seemed to grow a little quieter, and a lot kinder.
When on the next day we went to get some air and see the view from the 12th-floor closed balcony, Muslim and Jewish families and individuals continued waiting, eating and praying outside of the ICU, reflecting on the delicate balance created in the miraculous single Jewish nation-state, to which an archetypal indigenous people returned, committed to equality for all.
Only together, applying principles and expectations equally and consistently, can we ensure that the power of healing of the hospital becomes the norm, realising opportunities and growing from challenges, throughout all aspects of life, in Israel and beyond.
Editors notes:
This is an excerpt about the writer’s experience at Hadassah Hospital.
The writer, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, is a lawyer, research fellow and policy and strategy adviser on issues of immigration and integration, Israel-Diaspora relations, human rights and the fight against antisemitism. She served as an MK in Israel’s 23rd Knesset.
Read her full piece in the Jerusalem Post:
Hospitals’ healing power and diversity must become the norm – opinion – The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)
