Twenty-year-old Orly Pinchuk caresses a teddy bear every day in her room in Montreal. This is not the habit of a young woman stuck in her childhood, but of one, who, in her own words, “has grown up too fast.”
Once soaked by the blood and ashes of a 15-year-old teenager severely burned in the Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing in Israel last August, the bear, Orly says, “carries no external signs of the trauma; only we two know what it feels inside.”
It’s not easy to listen to Orly’s story, as some 20 others and I did Saturday evening, even as news of new bombings in Jerusalem added to the horror. But Debra and Marty Katz, co-chairs of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Super Sunday/Super Week phone-a-thon, knew what they were doing in bringing Orly to Milwaukee to speak to volunteers for this week’s fundraising drive for MJF’s Community Campaign 2002 and Israel NOW campaign.
For as dark as Orly’s story is, it is ultimately a story of hope and a reminder of why the Jewish people have survived for thousands of years.
In the summer of 1999, Orly, the product of a day school education and a “not-overly-Zionist home,” approached the Israel shaliach (emissary) in her hometown of Montreal for information on volunteer opportunities that matched her interest in the health sciences. By the end of the summer, she had completed a local training program for foreign volunteers run by the Jewish Agency for Israel (one of MJF’s two overseas partners) with Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambulance service.
The next summer, with one year of university science and a Canadian paramedics course under her belt, she became a foreign volunteer for Magen David Adom in Israel. “I mostly carried the paramedics’ bags,” she admitted, “and I didn’t see all that much. But I made a lot of friends in the absorption center the Jewish Agency put us up in and with people in the ambulance corps. And I knew I would go back.”
Go back she did, last May, as an intern with a year of paramedic work in Canada now on her résumé. Two weeks into her job with Magen David Adom in Jerusalem, she worked at the collapse of the Versailles wedding hall, which killed two dozen and injured hundreds. Hers was the 40th ambulance on the scene, she said.
But Orly’s greatest challenge occurred last Aug. 9, when she and her partners were the second ambulance at the scene of the suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria, which killed 15 and wounded 130.
“What I saw, blurred by my tears, was total chaos: sirens wailing, people screaming, some lying in pools of blood, overturned baby carriages, soldiers with rifles .
“As I was directed toward the [on-site] intensive care unit, people tried to attract my help. It was so hard to turn them down. But I had to deal first with the most critically wounded.”
After coming across two sisters, the younger of who she knew was dead, Orly rode with the other to Hadassah hospital, where the 15-year-old Miriam, severely burned and screaming in agony, entered intensive care.
Seven days later, following a long debriefing with her co-workers and a view of Miriam through the glass window of the ICU, Orly returned to Montreal, taking with her the bear that had comforted Miriam as Orly sought to keep her conscious.
It is a reminder not only of Miriam but of Orly’s deep friendship with her partners, one of whom had kept the old toy of his daughter’s in the ambulance to remind himself of how lucky he was each time he answered a call.
“It was so hard to leave Israel and the ambulance corps so soon after the Sbarro bombing,” she said. “I came home to embrace my parents. They have no idea what I’ve been through and how it may affect me in the future. Neither do I. What I do know is that I feel really proud to have been part of such a team. Here in Montreal I volunteer twice a week as a paramedic, with the Emergency Medial Services in the Jewish community’s Coté St. Luc.”
And where does this 20-year-old put the horror few of us have experienced?
“I’ve been seeing a counselor at McGill University, where I am a second-year microbiology student, to slowly begin to sort it all out,” she said.
“Yet even after tonight’s [Dec. 1] bombings in Jerusalem, I would have been able to take it,” she said. “Back in that ambulance with Miriam, I had a few split seconds when I had to say to myself, ‘Suck it up, and take care of this patient.’ And that’s what I did.”
“We brought Orly in,” said Marty Katz, “not for the shock value, but to take us someplace else. It’s easy to keep on doing things in our daily lives, to go on with our routines. And it’s not just about giving money. We need to keep our hearts alive and to remember what Israelis live with. People like Orly help light the fire that’s in all of us in the first place.”
As of this writing, Israelis were entering yet another horrific week of terror and loss, with multiple bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa killing at least 26 and wounding more than 200. Yet each time I heard the news reports, I thought of Orly and her story, and I found hope.
This Chanukah, as we kindle the candles that brought our ancestors out of spiritual darkness, let us also light the spirit in our hearts and keep alive our awareness of those whose days are still filled with darkness. And let us hope that we, our children and our community will also show in our lives the courage and dedication of 20-year-old Orly Pinchuk.
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