29 SEPTEMBER 2016www.jewishnews.co.uk

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THE HEROHEALER

I f Asael Lubotzky were a doctor in the UK, heads would turn when he entered a hospital. Handsome, confident and with a ready smile, he is the sort of man who attracts attention, but it is the specially

modified crutches on which he leans that would set him apart. Sadly this is not the case in Israel, where the sight of a young man with battle scars is all too commonplace and where Lubotzky, the senior resident in pediatric medicine at Jerusalem’s iconic Shaare Zedek hospital, inhabits two worlds, as that of healer and of the walking wounded.

If people stare at Lubotsky in the hospital, it is not because they are fascinated by his crutches with torches on the handles and suction pads on the base, but because they recognise him as the young doctor who has become something of a celebrity since publishing a memoir that turned into a local bestseller.

His book, From the Wilderness and Lebanon, is about his experience of battling the Shiite militia Hezbollah in Lebanon where, in 2006 at the age of 23, he was a lieu-tenant in the Golani brigade commanding a platoon of 30 soldiers.

Lubotzky was almost killed when a missile registered a direct hit on the spot on which he was standing in the tank. He survived with extensive wounds and with one leg so badly mangled his doctors were close to amputating it.

Lubotzky’s circumstances are extraordinary by any standard, but at Shaare Zedek, which in English means Gates of Justice, they have been treating the war wounded for almost 115 years and the hospital permeates with stories like his that beggar belief.

An injured soldier who saves children is just one of Shaare Zedek’s superheroes. Noga Tarnopolsky met him

Hope for us, hope for Israel, hope for the world

As the Second Lebanon War raged, Lubotzky, one of six children from the Gush Etzion town of Efrat, decided he would sign up for one more year in the army. After that, he planned “to return to the yeshiva and pursue an academic career in physics or chemistry”.

It was a foreseeable path for a Lubotzky, who was born and bred into the academy with his grandfather, Murray Roston, a native Londoner, a professor of English at Bar-Ilan University and his father, Alex, a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University. But that “one more year” as a soldier changed all that.

“I’ll never forget the pain,” he says reflecting on the moment of the strike. “There was no time to react. I’ll never forget the feeling of the explosion burning me from top to bottom. I saw smoke, ash, and my right leg twisted inside out with the shoe facing up. And I was holding myself up with my elbows.”

Critically wounded, Asael was rushed to a local hospital, where he became conscious just in time to overhear doctors discussing whether to amputate his legs.

In the end, limb salvage was chosen. It is a decision he will grapple with for the rest of his life.

The heavy neurological damage caused by the blast produces severe, constant neuro-pathic pain in both legs, “at every hour, at any moment,” he says. He undergoes daily sessions of physiotherapy. His back and right arm are

damaged as medics took muscle from his right shoulder to rescue the leg. He walks with the aid of an ankle foot orthotic, and sometimes resorts to a wheelchair.

At the time of the blast, he says, “as a healthy person, I’d had very limited exposure to medicine”.

“My situation exposed me to a completely new world and to the dynamic of a medical team that includes everyone from physicians and orderlies to nurses and therapists who keep a patient on track,” he explains.

More than a year later, with 15 operations under his belt, he had become something of an expert and was inspired.

“I got to see how medicine is not an exact science but involves a lot of humanity,” he says. “When you’re there for so long, the hospital

becomes a second home; you discover for good and for bad how a person’s attitude, a glance, even just a word can influence you dramatically. Part of my interest in the world of medicine began then.”

As he contemplated an unforeseen future, Lubotzky applied to the Hebrew University’s department of physics, as planned, and to the school of medicine.

“I hesitated because it was an area I knew less well, so I spoke with the doctors. I’d show up in a wheelchair with iron pins poking out of my arms and my legs, scars all over my body and told them I was thinking of becoming a doctor. Some of the doctors said I was crazy but some said: ‘If your head is ok and you really want it, nothing will stop you.’”

These days, his visible disability serves as an

opening to conversation when he meets new patients and their parents at Shaare Zedek.

“They see me and realise we’re all in the same boat,” he says, acknowledging that the sight of a doctor who is also a patient can be disorienting. “The cognitive dissonance is useful,” he says. “It removes you from the stereotypes—the fact that a doctor comes into the room either on crutches or in a wheelchair, it allows for more interaction and better chemistry with the kids or the parents because they know that whatever it is, we’re in it together.”

The children are not frightened by his extraneous accoutrements, which include an exoskeleton bracing his right leg. “They play with the crutches,” he says. “My kids put stickers on crutches, so there’s no need for me to bring in any toys. I have a built-in icebreaker.”

Lubotzky is a prime example of how Shaare Zedek doctors treat the patient not the illness and he is able to build strong and meaningful relationships with the children he sees.

Shaare Zedek is something of a family home for Lubotzky. He, his wife Avital and their three children were born there. His father-in-law, professor Michael Schimmel, directs the hospi-tal’s neonatal intensive care unit and Maru Gete, an Ethiopian-born officer who served alongside Lubotzky in the Second Lebanon War, now works alongside him as an otolaryngologist and is also his brother-in-law.

“I’m the shadchan!” Lubotzky declares with unabashed delight at the fact he introduced Maru to his younger sister, Shakked, who is finishing her doctorate in public health. They have also given him five nieces and nephews.

Professor Schimmel will celebrate his 40th anniversary at Shaare Zedek this month. He grumbles cheerfully about now being more famous as “Asael’s father-in-law than for my own achievements”.

Lubotzky smiles, but for all the glory, there are days when his pain is so acute he leaves the crutches at home and goes about his work in a wheelchair.

If he were a doctor in the UK this might cause a stir. In Israel they merely step aside for a healing hero.

www.jewishnews.co.ukSZ2 Jewish News 29 September 2016

Shaare Zedek / Safe in Their Hands

Asael Lubotzky and his brother-in-law Maru Gete, an otolarynologist at Shaare Zedek

THE FACT THAT A DOCTOR COMES INTO THE ROOM ON CRUTCHES OR IN A WHEELCHAIR ALLOWS FOR MORE INTERACTION AND BETTER CHEMISTRY

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NO ONE WANTS to deliver bad news but, when it’s necessary, Amran Jaber is some-what of an expert. Coping with the pain and panic of those who have been involved in terror attacks and major accidents is a key part of his job as the chief trauma nurse at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, and no one is better equipped to allay fears or, in the case of a fatality, inform the families.

Amran Jaber, 47, is so adept at handling this responsibility that last month he was invited to deliver a lecture on this very subject at the second Global Conference on Emergency Nursing and Trauma Care in Spain. Notably, Jaber was Israel’s only representative, but the fact he is an Israeli-Arab defied the global perception of Arab-Israeli relations.

He lives the country’s dichotomies daily and recalls being questioned about his allegiances by Arabs and Jews alike at university.

“I am very bothered when people try to put me into one of their categories,” he says. “In East Jerusalem, you can hear people saying Israeli Arabs are traitors, but I have never been to Palestine, and I just say ‘Leave me alone. I am Israel Arab, don’t come to me with preconceptions.”

At Shaare Zedek, where the conflict remains outside the hospital walls, Jaber is just a much-valued member of staff who has taught the hospital’s students since 1995. But on those rare occasions when a patient objects to being treated by an Arab nurse, he rises above it.

“If they object, that is the patient’s right, I’ve no problem with it,” he says. “ Just as one may not want to be treated by a man or another by a woman. It is perfectly acceptable. I have learnt not to be insulted.”

But those who have had the misfortune of being involved in a major trauma quickly

THE HEAD NURSE

WORKING ALONSIDE ASAEL LUBOTZKY AT SHAARE ZEDEK HOSPITAL ARE OTHER MEN AND WOMEN WHO DEVOTE THEIR LIVES TO HELPING PATIENTS. THESE ARE JUST A FEW OF THEM…

Amran Jaber is the chief trauma nurse whose inspiration is Florence Nightingale

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