By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
Ori Lazarovich is a 26-year-old Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedic who spent part of his childhood here in the Berkshires, in Lanesborough. His parents were both Israelis seeking opportunity in the United States, and his mother, Liat, found a teaching job at Sinai Academy, the now-defunct Jewish day school in Pittsfield. When Ori was in the 6th grade, he moved to Katzir, a community settlement (Yishuv Kehilati) in north-central Israel near Hadera and close to the Green Line border with Samaria; his maternal grandparents were Katzir’s founders, who “built the town up from nothing,” he says.
Lazarovich fondly remembers the Berkshires, particularly the “family feeling” of our small Jewish community where “everyone knows each other.” His transition to Israeli life, he says, was “pretty seamless. My Hebrew was good and the Judaic studies were great in Pittsfield, even better than some of the Israelis have here.” He discovered his calling as a paramedic in high school, where young Israelis are obliged to do volunteer work reflecting a commitment to give back to society. He received basic life support training from MDA, advancing through higher levels of training to where he was supporting critical emergency care units while still in high school.
Lazarovich continued his paramedic journey in the IDF, where he served as a combat medic “with the EOD – the Bomb Squad as you guys call it in the States.” After his IDF service was complete, he worked as a field paramedic and then as a station manager and instructor in the region where he grew up. More recently, he started work with MDA’s international unit, doing outreach and fundraising with communities around the world.
Lazarovich spoke to the BJV in early July, while a ceasefire between Israel and Iran was still holding following weeks of hostilities and the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Just weeks earlier, he was among the initial first responders to arrive on the scene following the devastating June 13 missile strike on civilians in Bat Yam. Nine lives were lost, including those of three children, and hundreds of people were injured. Lazarovich spoke about that terrifying night and MDA’s challenges in these recent years of COVID and conflict in Israel. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
The BJV Interview – Ori Lazarovich
What was your job like before October 7?
We Israelis get used to what we call it here in Israel “balagan” – havoc and mayhem all the time. We've been going since COVID, since 2019, from one thing to another, always something new, especially in my region which is very, very close to the Judea and Samaria border region. But we got to point where there was nothing new, no added chaos. We got into a routine. Yes, there is this action over there with the IDF, you don't enter this village and so on. Just before October 7, we were on the Tishrei holidays, so we were a little bit more laid back, a little bit less alert, although in MDA, we have different levels of preparedness up to 100 percent. So just before the holidays, we were in the middle level, not fully prepared like we were after October 7 until pretty much today.
We have shifts where we have weekends on and weekends off. The seventh of October happened to be my weekend off, so I wasn't on call. I always have my radio on with me, even when I'm at home. The region dispatch came on radio. It was around 6:30, 6:45 a.m. Red alerts, sirens throughout the country. I happened to be at my mom's house that Saturday because I wasn't at work. She hears me around 7 a.m. and says, “Hey, what are you doing up on your Saturday off?” I was like, yeah, a war started. There's something about it where we knew that so quickly, within ten or fifteen minutes.
I called all my team members at my different stations. I said, “Hey, we’ve got to get fully prepared. We have to get to the highest alert level, even before MDA’s general director says we have to.” By 8 a.m., my region was in the highest level of preparedness. We just went from there.
And we haven't stopped. Maybe civilians or Jews in the diaspora can feel that maybe the war stopped or was maybe a little bit less at times, but in MDA, we don't feel it. We always have something going on. We always have, sadly, civilian casualties or army personnel casualties. We're also Israel's National EMS service. We take care of funerals for soldiers. That’s where we were when the war with Iran started – another weekend, Friday in the middle of the night. We woke up to sirens. You don't even have to give out the orders. Everyone already knows what's going to happen. Everyone knows what they have to do. And the switch from 80 percent preparedness to 100 percent preparedness was seamless. I found myself at 3 a.m. heading out to our national dispatch, where we meet with the high-ranking officers of MDA. We make sure all of the regions are set to their level of preparedness and then we start transforming our EMS service into a national database for everything that's happening.
MDA is literally in every corner of every street with ambulances and regular volunteers with their own vehicles. Police, Homefront Command, and fire departments all rely on our dispatch and our local personnel to say exactly what's going on and give the fastest updates. Through those 12 days, we had massive missile strikes, massive, massive scenes with many casualties. Maybe the civilians were surprised, but MDA is always prepared for the next level of threat. We knew exactly what was going to happen. It's sad to say, but we were expecting even more severe scenes with bigger numbers of casualties.
And gladly, we saw that we have such great citizens here in Israel that are so prepared and that listen to what the Homefront Command tells them. We saw that it saved hundreds of lives. We treated over a thousand patients within those 12 days of war with Iran, but we are fully aware that it could have been way more. Thanks to our first responders and the citizens of Israel being so connected with the TV and the news outlets and Homefront Command, they do as they're told. They wait. Even if you have to sit in a bomb shelter in a safe room for 45 minutes, an hour and a half, they do it. They don't leave before they're told to. And it simply saves lives. There's no other way to say it.
Tell me about Bat Yam.
I had just gotten back from our national dispatch. I had been there for 24 hours, from 3 a.m. the night before until 1:30, 2 a.m. that night. I get home. We immediately get the red alert sirens. I run back down to our safe room. I have an MDA vehicle with me 24/7 with lights and sirens so I can get the scenes as fast as possible. We head into the safe room. We hear an enormous, enormous blast sound. And you understand that it's very close to you. We're not used to the size of these impacts and this size of missiles yet. We're talking about hundreds of tons of TNT within these missiles. Until that strike, we were used to having maybe 200 pounds of TNT as the biggest threats we've seen in the past 30, 40 years. Now, we're talking about 500 to 1,000 pounds of explosives. The explosions were gigantic.
At MDA, we tell the citizens to stay inside, but we leave, although it's not safe yet to leave. We understand that there's going to be another incident, another barrage of missiles, but we leave the safe rooms. This Bat Yam scene happened to be less than two miles away from where I live, but on my way there, we had another red alert. So, I stop my car on the side of the road. I enter a random apartment building that I see next to me. I knock on the door. They greet me and another two police personnel that were on their way with me to the scene. We get inside very quickly. We hear the booms. After, you have a few seconds where there is shrapnel coming down. But we don't even wait for the shrapnel to stop because we know there's a giant scene just around the corner.
When we got there, the Bat Yam station manager was on scene. He was very close to the incident. We start doing what we call triage. Triage is understanding exactly where the patients are, understanding exactly how big the scene is, how many patients we're expecting to get. I see a whole block of buildings just completely demolished. So, we're used to seeing a missile hit a building. You’ll see one floor that is damaged, and the rest of the building is fine, the rest of the area is fine. Here we have a building complex of four buildings that were hit. They're all completely demolished. At that point of time, we can't even understand how big the scene is because we see the two buildings in the front of the street which are demolished, and you have the two buildings behind them which are completely on fire.
The paramedics automatically start getting the patients out. Some of them are easier to extract, and we can just give them a hand and get them out of the rubble. Some need extraction out of the rubble itself. Those patients, sadly, we can't extract by ourselves. So, we do the best we can. Even the buildings that are on fire within the perimeter, we enter, put a rag, put on something, enter the building, and extract as many patients as you see and get out of there. Within a few minutes, the police, military, Homefront Command, and the fire brigade arrive, as well. At that point, we start working together, all of us, and we start making sure the fire gets put out, so it doesn't spread to other buildings.
This scene is new to us, because we're not used to having patients from missile strikes being pinned underneath a building, or with crush injuries, or whom we can't extract. With other mass casualty incidents, we're used to understanding exactly what's being hit, exactly how many patients are in a building or a bus. In this scene, we don't even know how many buildings were hit! I said to the MDA dispatch to send the amount of ambulances we’ll need for 100 patients.
Within 15 minutes, we have all the teams in the area and teams from other regions, as well – dozens of intensive care unit teams and dozens of basic life support teams, with first responders on scene with their own vehicles or with our small rapid response vehicles. We start treating those patients trapped in the rubble. Even though they can't be transported, we can still access them, maybe administer an IV, give them some medication, some pain management, some fluids, and we go from there.
At the end of the scene, within maybe three hours, we reached the 100-patient mark. I was like, wow, I thought I was exaggerating when I asked for so many ambulances, but yeah, we've transported over 100 patients, treated even more, and we still weren’t finished evacuating all of them. I think at that point, it hit me – we're in a completely different game. It's not what we're used to. It's not what we've seen. We've trained for it. We understood. We knew it was coming. But being on scene in the first scene of that size and that severity just hits you differently. I've managed many scenes as a station manager – very complex motor vehicle accidents and terror attacks and everything in between. But the first time you're on scene as a lead paramedic and you say, wow, I'm not sure how long I'm going to be here, how many ambulances I need, and how many patients I'm going to treat here – you have to switch. You have to change the way you work, the way you perceive a scene.
And what we do at Magen David Adom is we always learn from everything. Everyone who treats the scene, everyone who was on dispatch, we come together to understand what we did, what we could do better. We understand that, maybe within the next 24 hours, there can be another scene, or maybe 15 more scenes that are all the same. There's no time to waste. We have to learn. We have to adjust. We have to adapt. And we do that.
Tell me a little bit about the victims of the attack. What's it like managing people in that chaos?
In addition to the chaos, you have to understand that there are levels of patients. We've spoken about the most severe patients that are pinned underneath the buildings and all of that. Other patients within that scene – you have a patient who's looking for his medication, a patient looking for their dog, a patient looking for their relatives. We have to understand that with these kinds of blasts, we're seeing patients coming in from hundreds of yards away. No patient within that radius is a non-injured patient. Everyone is suspected to have some injury – a blast injury, minor shrapnel injuries, cuts and bruises, or acute stress reactions to the incidents. We have to take that into consideration.
You see a bunch of people carrying their children and their dogs and their cats and everything in between. Everyone is very confused. You see some of the people with real fear in their eyes. Some people are injured, and seeking help. Our job as EMS is to make sure that we attend to every one of those different levels of patients, and not only run towards where the patients can't scream anymore and can't call us. We have to figure out who is the 15-year-old kid looking for their iPad and who are the adults looking for their children or the elderly who are looking for their caregivers.
Currently, there is a ceasefire that everyone hopes will last. What state of readiness are you in now?
At Magen David Adom, we are always prepared for the next event. We're preparing for the next, bigger event. We also have to take into consideration that personnel can't last that long. We have 35,000 personnel, and 90 percent are volunteers. We have to refresh our units, our teams, our equipment, our personal protection gear. Just in the past year, we went from 24,000 volunteers to 35,000 volunteers. We have a project called the Magen Project, the Shield Project, in which we train and utilize medical personnel who aren't volunteers at MDA that live and work inside cities and towns. We use the physician next door, the nurse who lives across the street, and maybe the medical clinic we have across town. We make sure the MDA teams and civilians know how and where they are needed. We have to be prepared for the multi-front threat that's been imminent since October 7.
How does Magen David Adom manage the psychological needs and aftercare for responders like yourself?
We understand that we need the teams to be resilient. A scene can take place over 15 minutes, it can be three hours, and a scene can last a few days, as well. We see catastrophic incidents and people in their worst hour. We don't want to overtreat our people, but we do have interventional teams within each station. Each station manager goes over the teams and looks for signs of a huge stress reaction in the first few days. Our volunteers have phenomenal people who reach out and speak with the patients and the teams. The easiest and most important part is to look at the teams that are with you on scene, and just simply ask, “How are you doing?” We figured out that 90 percent of the problems are fixed and are treated with that simple question.
When we get to the hospital, after we finish treating patients, the first thing we do is summarize what happened. We validate the concerns and whatever we're feeling, and we make sure everyone's okay. And if someone isn't okay with what's happening, we continue from there.
To support the lifesaving work of Magen David Adom, visit the American Friends of Magen David Adom at afmda.org.
Magen David Adom is one of the worthy organizations supported by contributions to the Israel Emergency Fund made by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and its generous donors. Donate at: jewishberkshires.org/israel-crisis-2023.