rom outside, the medicalclinic of the Mother Teresamission in Addis Abeba

looks like a rundown warehouse, ablock-long concrete building withcrumbling walls. Inside, it looks likean emergency Red Cross shelter setup in a dank high school gym, withrows of blanket-covered young menlying on canvas cots.

On the rainy morning I visited theclinic in the capital of Ethiopia abouta decade ago, the only signs of activ-ity inside the crowded room werenuns scurrying around. Among thecots walked an American man, outfit-ted in a checkered cotton shirt, bluejeans and a baseball cap, a stethoscopearound his neck. For a few hours, Dr.Rick Hodes walked from cot to cot,consulting with the nuns in self-taught

Amharic, checking the condition ofeach patient, taking pulses, listening to

breathing and squeezing folds of skinto detect dehydration.

Hodes, a native of Syosset, Long Is-land, who studied medicine at the Uni-versity of Rochester and JohnsHopkins University and studied Ju-daism as a ba’al teshuvah at Aish Ha-Torah in Jerusalem, has worked

full-time in Ethiopia, one of theworld’s poorest countries. Since 1990,Hodes has served as medical directorfor the American Jewish Joint Distri-bution Committee (JDC or the Joint).Over the years, he treated theEthiopian Jews who eventually madealiyah. Then, the Falash Mura,Ethiopians from Jewish backgroundswhose ancestors had converted toChristianity, and in recent years, haveattempted to return to the Jewishfold. Then, everyone.

Hodes started making rounds atthe Mother Teresa mission in his sparetime shortly after he came to Ethiopia.Now, since most of the Ethiopians withJewish roots have left for Israel, andthe Joint’s clinic in the capital hasclosed, he’s still there; a full-time Jointemployee as part of the organization’snon-sectarian outreach.

He spends much of his time inAddis Abeba at the mission, and flying

28 I JEWISH ACTION Fall 5771/2010

Steve Lipman is a staff writer for the JewishWeek in New York.

“It doesn’t matterwhat religion he is;he is doing this forhumanity.”

F

Dr. Rick Hodes, an Orthodox Jew who lives inAddis Abeba, examines ayoung Ethiopian boy. Courtesy of JDC Rick Hodes

By Steve Lipman

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30 I JEWISH ACTION Fall 5771/2010

up north to the Joint’s remaining clinicin Gondar that serves the 9,000 FalashMura awaiting aliyah, who are listed byIsrael’s Ministry of the Interior. That’swhen he’s not patrolling the streets,looking for ill people, Christians andMuslims, to treat.

“It doesn’t matter what religionhe is; he is doing this for humanity,”Monica Thonen-Bartet, a Maltesevolunteer at the Addis Abeba mis-sion, told the Jewish TelegraphicAgency. “This is the most beautifulman I have ever seen.”

In Ethiopia, he’s known as “Dr.Rick” or “Dr. Musa” (his Hebrewname is Moshe). In medical circles,Hodes, fifty-four, is known as an ex-pert on exotic diseases, editor ofthe Ethiopian edition of WhereThere Is No Doctor: A Village HealthCare Handbook. In Jewish circles,he is known as the Orthodox1 Jewwho is trying to save his small cor-ner of the world.

Hodes, who is not married andhas no children, keeps in regulartouch by phone with his mother backin the US. He has been the subject ofcountless newspaper stories and afew documentaries focusing on hisselflessness and religious observance,the Shabbat meals to which he invitesJewish visitors and interested non-Jews, the young Ethiopians he hasadopted and taken into his rentedAddis Abeba home, the score of indi-gent patients for whom he hasarranged treatment in the West, thetimes he has gone to places like Albaniaand Tanzania and Bangladesh duringmedical emergencies. CNN named hima finalist in its 2007 Heroes competi-tion; ABC, a “Person of the Week.”Most recently, he was the subject ofMarilyn Berger’s This Is a Soul: TheMission of Rick Hodes, a biography thatpaints him as humanitarian if not out-right saint.

Small and wiry, a dedicated jogger,Hodes is quiet by nature, warmed upby strangers who need medical chesed.Kids swarm around him. During myfew days with Hodes in Ethiopia,where he served as my host, I accom-panied him to the still-open Joint clin-ics and the Mother Teresa mission. Iwatched him bantering with adults and

playing with children. He’d place hisstethoscope around the kids’ necks andshow them how to listen to his heart-beat. The doctor-patient relationshipreversed, even the shiest kid wouldwarm up.

I tried to get a reading of Hodes. Itold him how I had first heard of hisgood works several years earlier, in Is-rael. “A lot of people think you’re asaint,” I said, while we were walkingthrough a rocky field. Hodes stoppedwalking. “I’m not a saint,” he snapped.He was annoyed by the statement.

“Albert Schweitzer,” the late NobelPeace Prize-winning medical mission-ary, “is really a hero,” Hodes said.“Schweitzer got on a boat and didn’tknow whether he was going to get offtwo weeks later. I get on KLM andafter two meals and movie, get off theplane and complain that I’m jetlagged. So Albert Schweitzer is ahigh-level guy.”

Hodes sees hashgachah pratit inhis lifework; he notices the hand of

God in seemingly chance encountersthat, he says, are how he gets world-renowned specialists to sponsor freemedical treatment that ordinarilywould cost thousands of dollars. Hetells a story that took place at a Min-

neapolis-area synagogue: he hadstopped there for Shacharit andmade serendipitous connectionsthat resulted in a pair of lifesaving,free surgeries for patients who hadmassive tumors other doctors hadconsidered inoperable.

One of Hodes’ patients, a Muslimnamed Merdya Abdisa, had an or-ange-sized tumor removed from hereye at a Catholic hospital in St. Paulby the Orthodox Jewish doctorHodes met at shul, Eric Nussbaum.Dr. Nussbaum also operated on a manknown simply as Dawit, who had aseven-and-a-half-pound tumor grow-ing out of his forehead. Today Dawitis free of the tumor and is back inEthiopia getting chemotherapy.

Berger’s book tells of the dayHodes davened Minchah, in full viewof the patients, in the corner of a gov-ernment hospital in Tanzania, whilevolunteering during a refugee crisis.

“What country is he from?” oneonlooker asked.

“He is an Israeli person, a Jew,”Hodes’ translator answered.

After finishing his prayers, Hodesturned to the translator: “Tell them Iwas praying for their health.”

“I didn’t know Israelis pray for non-Israeli people,” the translator said. “Ofcourse we do,” Hodes said.

Another day, some refugees askedHodes what it means to be Jewish. Alregel achat, he explained, “The Jewishpeople were asked by God to be exam-ples to the world of three things: hon-esty, morality and kindness. That isthe point.”

The next day five young refugeesasked to see him. “Their demeanor,”Berger writes, was “very much like theone they would adopt when they areabout to report a death.”

“We agree,” one of the young mentold Hodes.

“Agree to what?” Hodesasked, baffled.

In all earnestness, they replied,“We want to join the Jewish people.” �

Marilyn Berger’s recent book This Is a Soul:The Mission of Rick Hodes tells the upliftingstory of a frum American doctor who hasspent nearly three decades caring for the poorand sick in Africa.

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Fall 5771/2010 JEWISH ACTION I 31

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