See OP title – in different cities with significant Orthodox populations, I’ve noticed a fairly robust presence of the private Hatzolah ambulances. Obviously there is a strong strain of self-help organizations in the tightly knit Orthodox world. But, most cities do have fairly well-developed EMS systems, right? So I was trying to figure out if the purpose of an Orthodox-run ambulance service was:
(1) Lack of faith in the secular municipal ones?
(2) Making sure the patient got taken to a “Jewish” hospital (at least in cities that have one)?
(3) Making sure that an Orthodox guy doesn’t run the risk of being touched by an unclean woman (I am assuming but have no data points that the Hatzolah EMTs are all men)?
I Googled but found only references to laudable self-reliance, which is fine and well but doesn’t really explain for me the seeming redundancy.
The explanation given in Wikipedia is, “The original Hatzolah EMS was founded in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York by Rabbi Hershel Weber in the late 1960s, to improve rapid emergency medical response in the community, and to mitigate cultural concerns of a Yiddish-speaking, religious Hasidic community.”
So the language difference is probably the biggest reason for the redundancy.
(1) I can’t speak about other areas, but the Hatzala in my town (spellings of the word do vary) was started after a few incidents where the community felt that the city ambulance was not fast enough. After the Hatzalah got started, response time did improve, and they and the city are now in a very friendly competition/cooperation mode.
(2) Not at all. The best care for the situation is always paramount.
(3a) The short answer is that many Orthodox people have such an intense feeling for the Sabbath and other Jewish laws that they are indeed reluctant to seek medical help from unknown sources despite constant reminders from their own rabbis that proper medical care overrides almost all ritual laws. These constant reminders made very little impact, and the breaking of this logjam is that the Hatzalah members are trained in both the medical aspects and also the Jewish laws, and so the community has, in large part, learned to respect the decision when a Hatzala EMT says, “Yes, today is the Sabbath, but you need to go to the hospital now.”
(3b) Yes, all the Hatzala EMTs are men. But not for the reasons described in the OP, because it would apply equally well for a male EMT and a female patient. Rather, my understanding its that the EMTs are all men because of the close work conditions – similar arguments as are made about having an all-male army. In addition, not only are they all men, but they are all married men; the reasoning here is that when dealing with a female patient, a married man can more easily keep his mind on the medical care, while a single guy would have more difficulty staying focused.
Can I be opportunistically Orthodox if it means having a 90 second ambulance response? Geez. I guess the geographic concentration in the typical Orthodox neighborhood doesn’t hurt.
Yiddish: Depends on how liberally you want to define “effectively”. In many Chasidic neighborhoods, there can be large numbers of people whose mother tongue is Yiddish, and can also communicate in English to a greater or lesser extent.
Thanks. [hijack]Someone told me no one speaks Yiddish (and in fact there is something of an affirmative aversion to it) in Israel because it is considered “the language of the ghetto.” I can think of additional practical reasons (probably would exclude a lot of the Sephardic/ME-originated folk). But, factually true?[/]
I don’t live in Israel and I’ve never been there but I know Israelis. The Hebrew language is seen as a nationalistic point of pride; tied into the fact that the Jews were able to re-conquer their Holy Land after millenia of being in the “diaspora,” and not only that, but revive an ancient language and turn it into a modern one. Yiddish is seen as part of the “diaspora,” a sign of the past, when Jews had to live in the “galut” (outside of Israel.) Diaspora just means all of the time between when the Jews left Israel after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and the re-capturing of Israel from the British in 1948.
I don’t think it’s true that nobody speaks Yiddish in Israel. According to a 1993 UNESCO report, about 200 000 Israelis speak Yiddish. Compare that to 210 000 US speakers of Yiddish (1990 census) or the report’s estimate of 150 000 speakers of Yiddish in Russia. (Sorry but I couldn’t find more contemporary figures on short notice.)
Among the non-religious, nationalistic, there’s definitely an aversion, especially among Sefardim whose ancestors never spoke Yiddish to begin with. But among religious Ashkenazim, especially among the most religious, the Yiddish language can be a tool for insulating themselves from the secular culture, in Israel no less than elsewhere.
Some Haredim in Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods speak Yiddish. There is a very small group of Jews who consider Hebrew to be a holy language and think it’s horrible to use it to, say, buy bus tickets and ask how much the cheese costs. But, yeah. Yiddish is not at all widely spoken in Israel, something I’m pretty sure my dad still doesn’t believe me about. (I think in his mind, a nation of Jews = a nation of his grandparents.)
I once saw a sign for a nursery school in Yiddish in Meah Shearim, a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem. That’s…pretty much it. There are loads of languages you’re more likely to hear spoken in Israel than Yiddish. After Hebrew, Arabic and Russian are the biggies, but English, Ukrainian, Persian, Spanish, French, Amharic…all of these are more common than Yiddish.
There are a lot of Yiddish borrow words in Hebrew, though. (“Nu?”) Still, probably no more than English or Arabic.
There was a strong popular movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s to stamp out the Yiddish language in Mandatory Palestine, which was largey successful. Its motto was “Hebrew, speak Hebrew!” (“Ivri, daber ivrit!”). There are still plenty of loan-words used (mostly slang), and Yiddish culture is still evident, primarily in Israeli humor.
Language differences probably explains why Hatzolah itself was founded - but in NYC, there wasn’t a centralized EMS system until the mid '70s. Queens has about 17 existing neighborhood volunteer ambulance corps most of which were founded around the same time as Hatzolah.