Two weeks ago, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback received a call from a congregant, Dina Aspen. Having seen the community’s Wise Webinars with experts in international relations and foreign policy, and the Wise community’s Ukraine response, she had a proposal.
On top of education and general advocacy, she said, the Wise community could take direct, focused action. They could save lives.
The result was a campaign to raise funds for United Hatzalah of Israel’s Operation Orange Wings, which sends charter planes with medics and medical supplies from Israel to Moldova, and then flies 150 refugees back to Israel on each plane’s return journey. As of this post, Stephen Wise Temple & Schools, in partnership with Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, N.J., have raised over $200,000 and counting. The effort was featured on CBS Los Angeles Evening News this Sunday.
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Since the start of the conflict, United Hatzalah of Israel has brought aid to more than 22,000 Ukrainian refugees, prepared and served well over 40,000 meals, brought in 60 tons of medical supplies and food, and established border command posts and advanced ALS field hospitals. They have also chartered six planes, each bringing 150 refugees back to Israel, with the only requirement for passage being Jewish ancestry, or, for non-Jews, a first-degree relative living in Israel.
The joint Wise-CBJ effort was initially aimed at funding one such roundtrip flight, costing about $100,000. That flight is now scheduled to land in Israel on March 31.
On Monday, Aspen joined a special Wise Webinar, along with the United Hatzalah of Israel team, Rabbi Yoshi, and Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, for a briefing from Moldova. They detailed the work they had already done, and the work that still lies ahead.
“As the war continues to escalate, the needs are growing exponentially,” said Aspen, a member of United Hatzalah of Israel’s Executive Board. “Right now our limiting factor is more funding.”
United Hatzalah needs that funding for medical evacuations from inside Ukraine—assisting the most vulnerable such as infants, the elderly, and Holocaust survivors—as well as for cargo planes full of medicine and medical equipment to be able to distribute to communities inside Ukraine. For the Wise-CBJ campaign, that means that every dollar raised over the initial goal will be used to fund additional cargo planes from Israel to Moldova, stocked with desperately-needed medical supplies and equipment, as well as trained volunteer medics.
Said Aspen: “We have a small window of time to fly our supplies in and get it into the hands of those who need it most—our teams of highly trained medics and doctors are directly impacting the quality of life for these Ukrainians.”
Just as in Israel—where United Hatzalah provides free emergency medical aid to anybody, regardless of race or religion—the aid in Moldova is available to all who are in need.
