Angels Under Fire   

On October 7, 2023 — Simchas Torah 5784 — over 1,000 volunteers of United Hatzalah willingly put their lives in danger and entered the war zone to save countless lives under fire. Miraculously, every single one of the volunteers who drove down south that morning returned home alive. Each one of the “angels in orange” has a story, and those stories are now being shared in a soon-to-be-released book

ITwas the most wrenching decision Hatzalah COO Dovi Maisel had ever made. How could he send his volunteers into the war zone when the first rule of emergency aid is to stay out of the line of fire? “I had to do it,” he told me, noting that the other national emergency crews were told not to enter any live-fire situation. “I had to allow them to go and save Jewish lives. Because that’s what we do.”

By Motzaei Yom Tov of Simchas Torah, the rest of us learned that Hamas had attacked the country from the air and the sea and through the border fence. We learned that they had gone from kibbutz to kibbutz slaughtering anyone they were able to kill, and that they had taken hundreds of hostages. We learned that they had attacked the people who had attended a music festival near Kibbutz Re’im.

We learned that they had infiltrated the cities of Sderot and Ofakim.

And we understood that something happened on that day that had changed the world as we knew it.