In Montreal, a community organization is assisting in emergency response, acting as a local supplement to the city’s official services. Called Hatzolah, and founded in 1996, this organization relies on roughly 80 volunteers, and donations from the city’s Jewish community, to help ensure short response times in the case of a medical emergency. Split in two groups, one serving the Outremont area, and the other supporting Montreal’s west end, members are trained by paramedics, and expected to attend monthly training sessions.
“We’re here as an adjunct and to offer an extra service to our community to help them in their time of need, to have the best outcome,” says Sheldon Goldberg, one of Hatzolah’s directors, told the CBC. “Our response time is generally between two and four minutes. Often that makes the difference between life and death.” Goldberg also noted that the idea behind the organization is “basically community members trying to help community members.”
Hatzolah is not the first such Orthodox Jewish organization – an earlier one having been founded in Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1960s to help address cultural concerns of the borough’s Hasidic community. Similar organizations also exist in Toronto’s Jewish community, and around the world in countries including South Africa, and throughout Central and South America.
Sources:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-hatzoloh-jewish-emergency-service-1.4884316
