THE SANCTITY OF LIFE

Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired British army officer, who has more experience in war and terrorism than almost anybody stated:  “The only reason Israel goes to war is to defend itself. And it has to defend itself because it is surrounded by countries, and armed groups, that want to destroy it”. The IDF is an army of defense because the primary tenet of Judaism is the sanctity of life. The Jews are not wired to be killers or avengers. That is why, even when facing an implacable enemy, we make every effort to minimize the killing of civilians

One of the most outstanding Jews who exemplified the sanctity of life was  Rabbi Yekusiel Halberstam, whose wife and eleven children were murdered in Auschwitz.   

A fellow inmate of the brutal concentration camp recounted the discussion the Rabbi  had with a German officer.The officer told him, “Every morning you Jews bless G-d for not making you gentiles. Now look who’s more important – you or me?”

The Rabbi explained to him that we Jews recite this blessing every morning because God gave us more commandments to perform than non-Jews. Without the least bit of fear, he then told the German, “Blessed be G-d, who did not make me a gentile. Otherwise, what interest would I have in being a Nazi gentile such as yourself, whose hands are full of Jewish and non-Jewish blood, and whose heart is devoid of any feeling, of any pity for the thousands of Jews that you murder day after day!”

His fellow prisoners recounted that he suffered so much at the sight of the sick being thrown by the side of the road, and condemned to die for lack of care, that he undertook a personal vow: If he were to survive that hell, he would build a hospital.

From Auschwitz, he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp as a slave labourer, and then to Muldorf Forest, where the Nazis were building an underground airport and missile batteries. In the spring of 1945 the Germans disbanded Muldorf and sent the inmates on a death march from which the survivors, including Rabbi Halberstam, were liberated by Allied troops in April.

He arrived to the U.S. in 1946, where he became a unique figure, renowned  as much for his scholarship, as for his holiness. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in the United States, Israel, and around the world, came to him for advice and blessings.

In 1958 Rabbi Halberstam established the Kiryat Sanz neighborhood in Netanya, for his thousands of followers, and moved there from Brooklyn in 1960. He never forgot his vow while in Auschwitz and, for the  next 15 years, he personally solicited donations towards building a hospital. Eventually, Rabbi Halberstam established the Laniado Hospital, a “not-for-profit” 484-bed hospital in Kiryat Sanz, Netanya.

On opening day, in 1975, the Rabbi announced a set of nine Founding Principles, emphasising the hospital's raison d'être, as a means of fulfilling the Torah's commandments: to heal, to love one's fellow man, and to demonstrate belief in God. 

The hospital started off as an out-patient’s clinic and, whenever he collected sufficient funds, another department was added. At the cornerstone-laying for Laniado's second building in 1980, he told the assembled crowd: 

“I was saved from the gas chambers, saved from Hitler. I spent several years in Nazi death camps. Besides the fact that they murdered my wife and 11 children, my mother, my sisters and my brother - of my whole family, out of 150 people I was the only one who survived - I witnessed their cruelty.

I remember as if it were today how they shot me in the arm. I was afraid to go to the Nazi infirmary, though there were doctors there. I knew that if I went in, I'd never come out alive. Despite my fear of the Nazis, I plucked a leaf from a tree and stuck it to my wound to stanch the bleeding. Then I cut a branch and tied it around the wound to hold it in place. With God's help, it healed in three days.

Then I promised myself that, if I got well and got out of there, away from those resha'im (wicked people), I would build a hospital in Eretz Yisroel - where every human being would be cared for with dignity. And the basis of that hospital would be that the doctors and nurses would believe that there is a God in this world and that when they treat a patient, they are fulfilling the greatest mitzvah (commandment) in the Torah (Pentatauch).”

Since opening its doors, Laniado Hospital has emerged as a modern and highly advanced medical centre - the only hospital in a growing region serving a population of close to half a million. It is also the only hospital in Israel which has never closed its doors due to a strike.

The Laniado Hospital stands as a testimony to the sanctity of each and every life lost in the Holocaust, and to the willpower and faith of its founder, the truly righteous Rabbi Yekusial Halberstam, z”l.