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PortugueseMany of the victims of the Boston Marathon twin bombing terror attack, which killed three people, one of them an eight-year-old boy, and injured 183 others, are being treated in Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard University. The Beth Israel Hospital was founded by Jewish American immigrants in 1916 and later on merged with Deaconess Hospital. Two of the most senior staff members of this particular hospital are Israeli citizens and both of them have played a critical role in attempting to heal the numerous trauma victims who survived the Boston Marathon Terror Attacks.
One of these two Israelis is Associate Professor Daniel S. Talmor, the Director of Trauma at the Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine Department of at Beth Israel Deaconess. Talmor was born in Jerusalem and studied medicine at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. For Talmor, what happened in Boston was reminiscent of what he experienced in Israel. He proclaimed, “There was a feeling of déjà vu. I can remember how, when I worked at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, we used to have injured soldiers lying next to terrorists. Luckily, before the bombing all the hospitals in the Boston area had already been reinforced because of the marathon, but rather than dealing with dehydration, they had to treat trauma patients.” He claims that the experience was very frightening and that he is “pretty sure that people around here are now going to understand Israel a little better now.”
Aside from Talmor, the president and chief executive officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dr. Kervin Tabb, is also Israeli. Tabb grew up in Berkeley, California, where he was part of a Zionist youth movement. Yet, he made Aliyah at age of 18 to live on a kibbutz and to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, where he met his future wife, Caron. He later on would study at the Hadassah University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, where he also received his medical training. Talmor returned to the United States in 2000 and prior to serving in this position, worked as the medical director at Stanford University Hospital.
According to Tabb, the Boston Marathon Terror Attack “was very similar to what I was used to in Israel in that we had to admit many injured people in a short period of time. The fact that we are treating both the victims and the suspected terrorist also reminds me of similar situations in Israel. In Israel we had an injured soldier and a terrorist lying on adjacent beds. When an injured person is admitted to the ER, the doctor or nurse treats him without asking questions. Whenever an injured party arrives at the emergency room, at the trauma section, the doctors and the nurses do what they are trained to do, and forget everything else.”
He claimed that the Boston Marathon Terror Attack resulted in “numerous leg injuries from the blasts, and there were many amputations as well. In Israel we are used to this and here they are not, but the hospital was prepared. Most of those who were seriously injured in the attack were sent to the three main trauma centers in Boston, including ours.” Liz Norden, the mother of two of the victims of the Boston Marathon Terror Attack who is presently being treated in the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, claimed that two of her sons lost a leg as a result of the twin explosions in Boston. She proclaimed, “I can’t even tell you how devastating it’s been. Those two bombers shattered my world.”
By Rachel Avraham
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