25 true stories of lives saved, people fed, children welcomed and strangers brought together, each one researched from published sources.
An American-born surgeon said yes to two sick children from Ethiopia. Thirty years later, his Israeli charity has given more than 8,000 children a healthy heart.
Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and Drew Weissman spent their lives on vaccines, and shared them with the world. Billions of children have grown up healthier because of it.
A tree thriving beside a leaky pipe gave an Israeli engineer an idea. Today his drip irrigation helps millions of farmers grow food with far less water.
A Jewish businessman and a Black educator joined forces with thousands of Southern communities to give Black children the schools they had been denied.
In 1999 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said put young Israeli and Arab musicians side by side in Weimar. The orchestra they started has been playing, and listening, ever since.
In 1933 a refugee physicist asked a group of Americans to help people fleeing Hitler. Their small committee grew into one of the world's largest humanitarian groups.
In 1934 a woman of 73 stood on a dock in Haifa to welcome a ship of teenagers from Germany. She met every ship after that, and more than 300,000 young people have since found a home.
Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze volunteers on motorcycle ambulances answer more than 2,000 emergencies a day across Israel, free of charge. Now the idea is spreading abroad.
From Haiti to Nepal to Turkey, Israeli rescue teams, doctors and aid workers have flown in within days of catastrophe, pulling survivors from rubble and delivering babies in tents.
A New York poet wrote a sonnet to help pay for a pedestal. Twenty years later her words were set in bronze inside it, and the statue has spoken them ever since.
In May 1991, a nonstop airlift carried about 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel. One jumbo jet alone held more than a thousand people.
Gertrude Elion, Rosalyn Yalow, Rita Levi-Montalcini and Rosalind Franklin were shut out of jobs and labs. Their work now sits behind medicines and tests used worldwide.
From 1958 to 1972, a conductor with an orchestra, a piano and a good question turned television into the liveliest music classroom in the world.
An ancient command against charging interest became a lifeline for immigrants, and now offers zero-interest loans to neighbours of every faith.
After Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg set out to record Holocaust survivors before it was too late. Their testimonies now teach millions of students.
In 1977 more than a hundred disabled protesters refused to leave a federal building for 26 days. Led in part by Judy Heumann, they won rights that now shape laws around the world.
In 1961 a London lawyer asked newspaper readers to write letters for people jailed for their beliefs. Millions of people around the world still answer that call every year.
A Baltimore engineer, the son of immigrants, worked out how much chlorine makes water safe to drink. His formula helped drive typhoid out of cities and made clean tap water ordinary.
A young nurse followed a crying child to a tenement bedside in 1893. What she saw there led her to bring nursing into homes and schools, and to give the world the idea of the public health nurse.
Many people who want to give a loved one a kidney turn out to be the wrong match. A Nobel-winning economist helped design the swaps and chains that let them save a stranger instead.
Clean water, salt and sugar, given by mouth, can save a child dying of diarrhoea. A Vienna-born doctor helped prove it, and the cheap remedy is credited with tens of millions of lives.
In 1948 a refugee doctor held an archery contest for 16 patients in wheelchairs. It grew into the Paralympic Games, where about 4,400 athletes competed in Paris in 2024.
A child refugee from Vienna grew up to help turn a small pink ribbon into a global symbol, and to found a charity that has put more than $1 billion into breast cancer research.
A film star used the profits from his food company to build a camp where sick children could play and forget the hospital. It became a free network serving children from more than 50 countries.
A young London stockbroker gave up a ski holiday and helped bring 669 children to safety in 1939. He kept quiet for almost 50 years. Today their descendants number in the thousands.
“These things have no fixed measure: the corner of the field, first-fruits, and acts of loving-kindness.”