Efrat opens TEREM clinic

Town gets its own emergency medicine center; ZAKA brings people together.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
A free-standing emergency medical center is being dedicated Sunday afternoon in Efrat after money was donated by residents and foreign donors. An emergency room was launched in a prefab structure at the beginning of the second intifada. The impetus come from the late Dr. David Applebaum, founder of TEREM urgent care clinics and director of Shaare Zedek Medical Center’s emergency department, who was murdered, with his daughter Naava, the night before her wedding at Jerusalem’s 2003 Cafe Hillel terror bombing.
Now a nearly $4 million, 2,100- square-meter, three-story permanent facility will offer many more services. Dr. Yitzchak Glick, an emergency medicine specialist who immigrated from the US and planned the facility with Applebaum, is voluntary medical director of the new center.
It will offer an emergency medical stabilization center, mass casualty center, large emergency bomb shelter, urgent care center, a regional Magen David Adom and ambulance station, a radiology center, a private pharmacy and specialists’ clinics for the Meuhedet health fund. As MDA and Meuhedet will rent space, it will help the non-profit center meet ongoing costs.
The facility, says Glick, even has an emergency birthing center. While not the ideal place to have a baby, the facility will be a boon for the five or six women a year from the Kiryat Arba to Jerusalem area who go into labor before reaching a hospital.
In the meantime, it will be open 18 hours a day, said Gluck, who is a recipient of the President’s Volunteer Prize. The center, which will serve some 25,000 residents of the area, is manned mostly by residents of Efrat.
More information can be obtained at www.efratemergencymedical.org.
ZAKA BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER
The ZAKA emergency evacuation organization will expand its minorities unit to include more Beduin and Druse in the Negev, Galilee and Triangle of Israeli Arab towns in the Sharon area, ZAKA founder and chairman Yehuda Meshi-Zahav has announced. “ZAKA not only works for the benefit of all; it also brings together volunteers from all sectors of Israeli society,” he added.
Meshi-Zahav, a hassid who was formerly an anti-Zionist activist, met with the deputy minister for the development of the Galilee and Negev, MK Ayoub Kara to discuss the expansion. It will enable the volunteer organization to respond more efficiently to emergencies in these areas, he said. The minorities unit is currently manned by 60 Beduin and Druse.
Kara noted that the ZAKA organization, comprised mostly of Orthodox Jewish men, has proven its abilities in recruiting and operating thousands of volunteers from all sectors of Israeli society and integrating them to help everyone in need.
The Bible, said Meshi-Zahav, tells us that “Man was created in the image of God.” This is the motto of ZAKA – to help and offer assistance to everyone, regardless of religion, race or creed.”