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OCTOBER 29,| The 2015Jewish The Jewish Jewish Home MAY 6, 2021 Home Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 || The
UNITED TO HELP United Hatzalah Member Kalanit Taub Shares Her Experience BY SUSAN SCHWAMM
Kalanit, thank you for your time. I know that you must be reeling from the events last Thursday night in Meron. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you joined United Hatzalah. I moved to Israel 17 years ago and live in Efrat with my family. I joined Hatzalah a year and a half ago. You’ll be surprised by why I joined Hatzalah. Did you see, around 2½ years ago, a video by Nas Daily about United Hatzalah? Nas Daily makes 1-minute videos every day, and he made a 3-minute video about United Hatzalah because their response time is 3 minutes or less. I made a comment on the video saying that my goal is to someday be an EMT. After the video came out, someone told me that an EMT course was starting in Efrat two weeks later. And so, I joined the course. The course took
about 6 months and was a very intense course. So, this was your first time at Meron with Hatzalah, as there was no hilula there last year. Actually, this was the first time in my life that I was ever at Meron. How many other United Hatzalah members were there at Meron? I didn’t see everyone, but I heard, and it makes sense to me, that there were around 500 Hatzalah EMTs there. What were you expecting when you came to Meron in the capacity as an EMT? I was at Kever Rachel a bit over a year ago, at the hilula of Rachel Imeinu, and I was expecting it to be pretty much the same – people getting stepped on, people fainting,
people not feeling well. At Kever Rachel, someone I treated was diabetic and hadn’t eaten the whole time while she was waiting to get to the tzion, so that’s what I was expecting to see. In Meron, most of the time, I was in the ambulance. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the layout of Meron, but they don’t allow private cars to come all the way to the tzion. There are a bunch of different parking lots – it’s all super-organized – all around. People park their cars and then walk up to the kever. You can have people fainting in the parking lots or while they were walking on the side of the road because they couldn’t get a bus, people can feel sick or be dehydrated. The need for medical response is not just at Meron itself but also on the road to Meron and the parking lots around. I was in the ambulance, and we were going around to different park-
ing lots based on where the medical need was. When the call came out for help, we were right by the entrance to Meron, we were not actually in Meron in the center of things. We were actually right by the command post. What was the call that went out? We actually got a call that a building collapsed. As we were going up the hill, we were hearing that there’s a CPR ongoing, then two CPRs, then three CPRs…by the time we got to the top of the hill – which didn’t take too long – we were hearing that there were five ongoing CPRs, which is really not typical. At a really bad accident, we’ll have one or two CPRs. Hearing that – five CPRs going on – sounded like this was going to be intense and big and catastrophic. We got to a point with the ambulance which was as far as we could
