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June 13, 2008
Hospital offers hope
Sofer describes the tough realities of Israeli life.
RHONDA SPIVAK
Author, journalist and media relations expert Barbara Sofer visited Winnipeg recently to speak about Israel at 60 at a number of venues throughout the community.
Sofer, who is the director of public relations and communications for Hadassah Hospital and a popular columnist for the Jerusalem Post, spoke to high school students at Balmoral Hall and Ravenscourt, giving them a brief overview of the Jewish people's historical and biblical claims to the land of Israel.
Sofer told the students what it is like in Jerusalem living with terror attacks. She told them about her cousin, Mark, who was on the 38th floor of the second tower during 9/11, when he heard the first plane crash and, luckily, escaped death. In 2002, he decided to make a trip to Israel to thank God for his being saved. In Jerusalem, he and his wife and daughters went downtown on Jaffa Road to "go shoe shopping." A young Palestinian woman walked into the store they were in with a 22-pound bomb and then, "90 seconds later, she blew herself up," said Sofer, who was down the street at the time and heard the blast.
Sofer described how she went to a downtown hospital looking through all the beds to find her 12-year-old niece Jamie. "I find her and her eyes are badly injured," said Sofer, who accompanied Jamie in an ambulance to Hadassah Hospital.
"The suicide bomber who injured Jamie was Wafa Idris [the first female suicide bomber in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], who was a volunteer paramedic with the Red Crescent. The ophthalmologist at Hadassah who treated Jamie was a Palestinian doctor, Dr. Amar. Here are two Palestinian women, said Sofer, one is out to destroy and one is there to heal. One is the "horror" and one is the "hope": "It is the hope that keeps me going.... I look for possibilities of hope whenever I can," said Sofer.
Jessica Goldberg, a student at Balmoral Hall, said, "Many of the girls who heard her [Sofer] speak, found her very interesting. They didn't know a lot about Jewish history and liked that her presentation was interactive."
However, not all of the students who heard Sofer were sympathetic to Israel. In fact, at Ravenscourt, one outspoken student challenged Israel's right to exist, saying that he thought all Palestinian refugees ought to be allowed to return to Israel and if they outnumbered Jewish Israelis, then "Jews ought to live as a minority in a Palestinian state." Although Sofer took issue with his comments, he persisted in his claim that Jews were not a people, "but a religion only, and maybe a culture."
At a talk she gave at Herzylia Synagogue, Sofer spoke about how, in her capacity as a director of Hadassah's public relations, she arranged to meet a British member of parliament who had made a remark "that if she [the British MP] were a Palestinian, she too would have become a suicide bomber."
"I took her to meet a Jewish doctor at Hadassah, whose parents had both been killed in the Holocaust. Both he and his brother had decided to become doctors, in order to spend their lives healing the world. They had to decide if they would spend their lives being angry and seeking revenge or try putting their energies to helping and rebuilding," she said.
Sofer also took the MP to meet a Jewish obstetrician at Hadassah, whose only son was killed by a Palestinian terrorist. "Every day, this woman still delivered Palestinian babies and, when she did so, she would hear the voice of her beloved son who was telling her, 'don't become like them [the terrorists].' "
Sofer said, "I don't know if we had any impact on changing the views [of the British MP], but I felt it was important to try, and not to give up."
Sofer won the 2004 Special Award of the Israeli Association of Public Relations for her international campaign "Island of Sanity," about the ability of Hadassah Hospital staff to maintain their values despite their experience of terror.
Rhonda Spivak is a Winnipeg freelance writer.
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