For residents of Yerushalayim’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood, seeing members of Magen L’Chole pulling equipment out of its office on Shabbos and driving the organization’s vehicles is not strange event. Actually, the need arises quite frequently.

This particular story began on an erev Shabbos, with the family of the patient approaching the organization’s head, Rav Binyamin Fischer. The contact was not made in person, but via a telephone call from Ukraine.

The official who explained the situation to Rav Fischer told him there is a little Jewish infant, a three-week-old preemie with a very rare and complicated heart defect that demands immediate attention.

After obtaining the necessary medical data, the rav began searching for an appropriate hospital with a bed in Israel, locating just what he was looking for in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in the capital. After medical consults, the decision was made to fly the infant to Israel immediately, compelling Magen L’Chole to move into action, as it has done so many times in the past.

The appropriate officials in the organization contacted Luxemburg Tours in Bnei Brak, which runs medical transport flights, and the permits were arranged as well as the logistical preparations and notifications to various companies and agencies. The actual final permits only arrived shortly before Shabbos, compelling the organization to begin preparing and moving into Shabbos as they fought the clock to save this small Jewish infant.

The organization is a well-oiled mechanism, and the “nohel Shabbos” (Shabbos protocol) was implemented and a non-Jew drove around and picked up those instrumental in this mission and a flight left for Ukraine and was back on its way to Eretz Yisrael before the end of Shabbos. Rav Fischer was constantly updated as he runs the command center during such complicated operations, keeping his finger on the pulse of all the various agencies involved in the life-saving mission.

It should be pointed out that this organization does everything possible to place as much of the chilul Shabbos in the hands of a non-Jew, and the posek for the organization is none other than Rav Yehoshua Noiworth Shlita, the author of Shmiras Shabbos K’Hilchasah.

In this particular case, due to adverse weather conditions on the return flight accompanied by the atmospheric pressure changes, the pilot was compelled to change course to accommodate the infant’s fragile condition, making the tenuous situation even more complicated.

The plan arrived during the predawn hours on Sunday and following a preliminary examination upon arrival, the infant and his mom were taken in a Magen L’Chole ambulance to Hadassah, where he is admitted to a neonatal cardiac intensive care unit.

(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)