In her apartment in Beersheba, Rachel Ohana is listening to the living room television with one ear as she makes her famous Moroccan meatballs in the kitchen.
She has an amazing 30 pounds of meat to grind for her holiday meals. Her son Shimon, a newly minted Border Police officer, is bringing home two new immigrant friends serving with him. The newcomers, from Russia and Ethiopia, have never experienced the Israeli Sukkot holiday, and Shimon, her only son after five daughters, has bragged about his mom’s cooking.
On the TV, she hears a bulletin. A soldier has been seriously wounded in Jerusalem. “I pity his poor mother,” she says aloud to herself.
Only later will she learn that she is his poor mother.
What would be called the Second Intifada begins with a shooting in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem. The Border Police, Mishmar Hagvul, are dispatched. Among them is Shimon Ohana, just 18, only a few months into training.
The shooting begins as the schoolchildren are walking home from school. Shimon arrives just in time to push a mother out of the line of fire. In saving her, Shimon takes three bullets in the chest and stomach.
There are videos of the Magen David Adom medics trying to revive him. They don’t succeed. They contact Prof. Avi Rivkind, head of the Shock Trauma Center at Hadassah Ein Kerem and recipient of this year’s Israel Prize. He is already waiting for the wounded man. “Bring him dead or alive,” Rivkind insists.
In the trauma room, covered in a body bag, Shimon is hoisted onto the table. He has bullet holes in his heart and stomach. He is marked DOA – dead on arrival.
On this Independence Day, even as Avi Rivkind receives the recognition for his life’s work, he remembers as clearly as yesterday the moment he ordered his astounded staff to bring the curly-haired soldier back to life.
Everyone in the trauma room is shocked. Israel’s first traumatologist, who teaches medical students about trauma, Rivkind knows better than to try to bring back a penetrating trauma patient with no pulse.
He calls it not a sixth sense but a moment of heavenly inspiration. He knows the answer to the question that isn’t in the textbooks. Vast units of blood are poured into Shimon’s heart. The cardiothoracic surgeon sews one bullet hole, and then finds another and repairs that. He massages the heart until he feels the first beat. It begins to pump.
In our country, where no one is shy about expressing opinions, a colleague sneers, “So now what have you done, Rivkind? He’s a vegetable. You should have let him go.”
In Beersheba, Rachel Ohana is still cooking when she hears a car pull up outside her apartment block, the doors opening, then slamming shut. From the kitchen window, she sees her husband, Meir, a policeman, surrounded by higher-ranking police officers.
Something in their body language frightens her. All she can think of is that internal affairs has found some flaw in her husband’s performance. But the policemen have brought far worse news. Shimon is in grave condition in Jerusalem. She remembers her words “I pity his poor mother.”
Rachel unties her apron and tosses the meat into the freezer. The drive from Beersheba to Jerusalem feels endless.
In Jerusalem, colleagues have insisted that Rivkind share Shimon’s poor odds of recovery with his parents. They step in and tell her that according to statistics, Shimon has a 0.1% chance of recovery. Oddly, the tall trauma surgeon named Avi Rivkind shakes his head. “Don’t worry,” he says. “He will wake up, and I will dance at Shimon’s wedding.” One day goes by, and then the next. Nonetheless, Prof. Rivkind continues to tell Rachel and Meir that they shouldn’t worry.
Against every medical expectation
Seventeen motionless days pass. And then suddenly, on day 18, Shimon’s eyes flutter, and he wakes up. Rachel is giddy with joy.
The celebratory moment isn’t complete. Shimon refuses to eat. Rachel knows that her pampered youngest is a fussy eater.
“What’s his favorite food?” Rivkind asks.
She’s a little embarrassed. Rachel says, “My meatballs.”
Rivkind orders her to go home to Beersheba and make meatballs. On the way home from Jerusalem, she phones her neighbor to take the ground meat out of the freezer.
All night, she shapes meatballs into egg-sized balls and cooks them in her signature sauce. She returns to Jerusalem in the early morning with an aluminum pot redolent with the aroma of coriander, garlic, cumin, and mint.
Rachel knows her meatballs are not on the diet of the average recovering invalid. Now she gives Rivkind orders. “These are Moroccan meatballs, not dainty Swedish meatballs. Stand by my side while I feed him.” The surgeon agrees. Shimon gobbles down the first meatball, and then another. She pauses, nervous about going further. Shimon looks unhappy. “He’s still hungry!” bellows Rivkind. “Give him more!”
And so she does, until at last, Shimon smiles, satisfied.
On November 23, bolstered by medical care and a daily diet of Moroccan meatballs, Shimon and his parents walk out of the hospital.
He still needs physical, cognitive, and occupational therapy.
He falls in love with Aviyah, one of the aides.
Soon after, in a wedding hall in Beersheba, Avi Rivkind walks Shimon Ohana down the aisle and dances with the groom. I was there to see it. Rivkind is later the sandak, holding their baby, carefully watching the mohel perform the circumcision, when Shimon and Aviyah’s son Uri Meir is born.
Rivkind isn’t one of those doctors who wear a kippah, but he is a descendant of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk. “We believe that at the cusp of life and death, no patient wants us to ‘let him go,’” says Rivkind. “That’s the dictum that has informed my life’s work.”
The life’s work that won him the 2026 Israel Prize.
Rivkind is the only child of Holocaust survivor parents. Both his parents were saved by Righteous Gentiles. That also informs his life, he says.
And Shimon’s revival? “Of course, it’s a miracle,” Rivkind says, surprised at the question. “A God moment.”
When Rachel Ohana hears that Rivkind would be awarded the Israel Prize, she phones him and fills his ears with a cornucopia of blessings. She also has news to report. Her grandson Uri Meir, like his dad, is serving in the Border Police, protecting Israel.
This is my favorite Avi Rivkind story. There’s also a story about me accompanying Shimon and Rachel to Paris when Avi spoke before skeptical French physicians, and Shimon stood up at the end of the speech. And there’s the day after the al-Qaeda attack in Mombasa, Kenya, where Israelis had gone to get away from terror, when a seriously wounded woman named Ronit looks up in the Mombasa hospital and sees Rivkind standing near her bedside. “I thought I was seeing angels,” Ronit says.
A lifetime of stories.
Mazal tov, Prof. Rivkind.■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, cowritten with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.