www.jewishnews.co.uk
29 SEPTEMBER 2016
Hope for us, hope for Israel, hope for the world Supplement
THE HERO HEALER An injured soldier who saves children is just one of Shaare Zedek’s superheroes. Noga Tarnopolsky met him
I
f Asael Lubotzky were a doctor in the UK, heads would turn when he entered a hospital. Handsome, confident and with a ready smile, he is the sort of man who attracts attention, but it is the specially modified crutches on which he leans that would set him apart. Sadly this is not the case in Israel, where the sight of a young man with battle scars is all too commonplace and where Lubotzky, the senior resident in pediatric medicine at Jerusalem’s iconic Shaare Zedek hospital, inhabits two worlds, as that of healer and of the walking wounded. If people stare at Lubotsky in the hospital, it is not because they are fascinated by his crutches with torches on the handles and suction pads on the base, but because they recognise him as the young doctor who has become something of a celebrity since publishing a memoir that turned into a local bestseller. His book, From the Wilderness and Lebanon, is about his experience of battling the Shiite militia Hezbollah in Lebanon where, in 2006 at the age of 23, he was a lieutenant in the Golani brigade commanding a platoon of 30 soldiers. Lubotzky was almost killed when a missile registered a direct hit on the spot on which he was standing in the tank. He survived with extensive wounds and with one leg so badly mangled his doctors were close to amputating it. Lubotzky’s circumstances are extraordinary by any standard, but at Shaare Zedek, which in English means Gates of Justice, they have been treating the war wounded for almost 115 years and the hospital permeates with stories like his that beggar belief.