Hatzolah

Hatzolah is the local volunteer emergency medical service that appears throughout the memoir at moments when illness, injury, or uncertainty brings medical care into view. Its ambulances and paramedics provide practical emergency assistance, but the episodes also place that assistance within a tightly observant community, where religious rules can shape when families receive news and where troubling reports may be difficult to verify.

Organization and Role

The account identifies Hatzolah as a local organization with its own ambulances and paramedics. It is treated as a familiar part of community life: a possible source of urgent help, a service that can transport people to hospitals, and an organization whose members may encounter distressing circumstances while responding to calls. The narrative does not describe its formal structure or procedures in general; instead, its function emerges through specific incidents and the different ways people rely on, anticipate, or discuss it.

That range matters. Sometimes the narrator expects Hatzolah to be called but is reassured before anyone contacts it. At other times, an ambulance actually takes a patient away. In the most troubling account, a relative’s report about what happened after a call is mixed with hearsay and uncertainty. Hatzolah is therefore shown both as an emergency service and as part of the community network through which urgent information travels.

Calls, Crowds, and Expected Help

When the narrator first discovers menstrual bleeding, she is frightened and expects a medical emergency. Seeing her grandmother on the phone, she waits for her to end the conversation, then signals that she needs help. The narrator privately anticipates that Hatzolah may be called to take her to the hospital. Instead, her grandmother calmly provides a piece of cotton and explains that bleeding is a normal bodily process. No call is made. The scene shows Hatzolah as an available possibility in the narrator’s mind, while the adult response reframes what she fears as a routine experience rather than an emergency.

A different image of demand appears during the crowded holiday festivities at the synagogue. Thousands of women press into the gallery to see the rabbi dance, while the men gather below. The building has exceeded its legal capacity; people faint in the heat, and calls for Hatzolah are heard. One man asks for a stretcher, and the person who has collapsed is taken to a side room. The account establishes that medical distress is part of the night’s overcrowded conditions, but it does not specify which calls Hatzolah answered or who carried out each response. The contrast is between the crowd’s anticipation of a religious spectacle and the repeated signs that people in the packed building need assistance.

Hospital Transport and Religious Constraints

Hatzolah’s practical role is clearest after the narrator develops severe abdominal pain and prolonged vomiting. Her husband contacts an EMT friend, Michoel, who belongs to the local Hatzolah organization. Michoel explains the policy as he understands it: abdominal pain in a woman warrants hospital transport in case the cause involves her uterus. The couple is dropped off at the NYU emergency room, where the narrator is eventually examined by an infectious-disease specialist and diagnosed with orbital shingles. Hatzolah’s part in this episode is transport, not diagnosis; the medical explanation comes later from hospital staff.

The service also transports Eli’s brother Yossi after he collapses from drinking too much cognac before the morning meal at his parents’ home. A Hatzolah ambulance takes him away, but the household cannot use phones during Shabbos and must wait until it ends to learn what has happened. Once contact is possible, the family hears that Yossi’s stomach was pumped at Cornwall Hospital and that he is doing all right. Eli and the narrator drive to collect him; he emerges pale and withdrawn, refusing to talk. The ambulance provides immediate help, yet the religious restriction on phone use delays the family’s knowledge of his condition.

The Reported Death and Unanswered Questions

A later conversation introduces a more disturbing and uncertain account. Eli tells the narrator that his brother Cheskel, an EMT and Hatzolah member, had responded to a call before Shabbos and found a boy dead on arrival. Cheskel is said to have been traumatized and to have shared the information privately with Eli. In relaying what he heard, Eli reports that neighbors had described loud arguing at the house and that dispatchers told Cheskel to go home and keep quiet because they would handle the matter.

The account grows more alarming through further reported details: Eli says Cheskel was told the boy had been buried within thirty minutes and that no death certificate had been issued. These claims reach the narrator indirectly, through Eli’s account of Cheskel’s account, and Eli stresses that Cheskel does not know for certain what happened. The narrative therefore does not establish that a killing occurred or that Hatzolah as an organization concealed one. It presents an allegation about a dispatcher’s instruction alongside uncertain neighborhood reports, and it keeps that uncertainty visible.

Eli urges the narrator not to repeat what she has heard, warning that Cheskel could face trouble for speaking. He invokes the requirement for two witnesses to prosecute a man for murder and argues that the boy cannot be brought back. The narrator is left with the contrast between the community’s strict attention to minor breaches of religious norms and the possibility that a child’s death may go unreported. Hatzolah’s presence in this episode is no longer simply the promise of an ambulance: through an unverified account of what happened after a call, it becomes entangled with the limits of testimony, communal silence, and the difficulty of knowing what emergency responders were told to do.