Medic Recounts the Small Gestures and Heavy Cost of Emergency Response
After more than two decades of volunteering in Israel’s emergency services, Isaac Katz says the work has taken him to the hardest scenes imaginable, while also teaching him about family, gratitude, resilience and the power of small acts of kindness. In a long conversation with Eli Guthelf, the United Hatzalah volunteer and Ramat branch chair reflected on the personal cost of the job and on moments that still sustain his faith in people.
Katz opened by describing a childhood answer that shaped his life. When his father asked what he wanted to be, he replied that he wanted to be "a rabbi who volunteers in rescue." He says he later followed that instinct into both education and emergency response, taking first-aid training at 14, before the minimum age, then moving through roles as an ambulance driver, dispatcher and instructor. Alongside that, he worked as a teacher, guide, rosh mesivta, creator of a mentoring project at Yad Eliezer and in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox education department.
He said many volunteers leave not because of gruesome calls, but because of the strain of leaving home in the middle of Sabbath meals or sleep, rushing out at 5 a.m. to a heart-attack scene and returning covered in blood or shaken. Katz stressed that the field is highly regulated, with rules, training and required hours, and said outsiders often fail to understand how much emotional weight volunteers carry. He noted that extreme reactions to such scenes are normal and that United Hatzalah has a resilience unit for those who need help, although he personally has never used it.
The most searing story he shared involved a family farewell to a dying child, where the father, who had already buried one child from the same illness, gathered his ten children and told them the sick boy had suffered and deserved a proper goodbye. Katz also recalled how, after the Ramat Junction terror attack, he helped locate victims’ families and inform children before they learned through social media. In one case, he and another volunteer gave children cheap United Hatzalah keychains, and the children reacted with joy despite just hearing their father had been murdered. Katz said that giving to others can be the best way to survive personal hardship, adding, "If you are selfish, it is worth being altruistic."
