From where does a man fighting for his life muster up the will to help another cling to life?
IT was March 2020, just weeks before Pesach, when Rabbi Shlomo Ellituv started feeling under the weather. He had retired recently from the Manchester rabbinate and returned to his native Israel only two months prior when he was struck ill.
“No one could tell us what it was, so we treated it like a flu,” Rebbetzin Rivka Ellituv recalls. “We assumed we could treat it at home. We gave him antibiotics. They didn’t help. His breathing worsened, and we brought in an oxygen concentrator from Yad Sarah. Finally, his lips turned blue, and I got scared.
“ ‘Shlomo, this isn’t okay!’ I told him. ‘We’re getting you to the hospital!’ ”
At Shaare Zedek, Rabbi Ellituv joined approximately 120 others fighting for their lives in the hospital’s three coronavirus wards, victims of the virus’s first and deadliest wave.
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