In 1995 a doctor in Ethiopia asked a surgeon in Israel for help with two children whose hearts were failing. The surgeon said yes, and then took the children into his own home while they recovered.
Two children and one answer
The request reached Dr. Amram "Ami" Cohen at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, just south of Tel Aviv. An Ethiopian doctor had been referred to him by a mutual friend, and he had two young patients who needed heart surgery that no hospital in their country could give them. Cohen arranged the flights, won approval from the hospital and operated. While the children recovered, they stayed with him and his family.
That act of hospitality became Save a Child's Heart. The charity's founding motto came from Cohen himself: "If we can, we should." The idea was simple. Children with congenital or rheumatic heart disease who could not get care at home would be brought to Israel and treated free of charge, whichever country they came from.
The surgeon behind it
Cohen was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954 and earned his medical degree at the University of Virginia. He trained as a heart surgeon in the U.S. Army at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. During a posting to Korea in 1988, he met Harriet Hodges, a woman who was helping Korean children with heart disease find treatment. She urged him to operate on them, and with the army's permission he did. The charity later described that work as the seed of everything that followed.
In 1992 Cohen moved his family to Israel and joined Wolfson, where he became deputy chief of cardiovascular surgery and head of pediatric cardiac surgery. Working with colleagues including Dr. Akiva Tamir and Dr. Sion Houri, he built Save a Child's Heart from a handful of cases into a programme. In 1996 the team operated on its first Palestinian child. In 1998 it went on its first surgical mission abroad, to China.
In August 2001 Cohen died at the age of 47 while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. His colleagues were devastated, and they promised one another that the work would continue. It did.
From a few patients to thousands
The charity grew steadily after his death. Its 1,000th Palestinian patient, a girl from Nablus, was treated in 2009. In 2011 it opened a children's home in Holon where up to 60 children, mothers, nurses, volunteers and trainee doctors can live during treatment. In 2019 it treated its 5,000th child, who was the daughter of a former patient operated on more than twenty years earlier.
Recognition followed. In June 2018 Save a Child's Heart received the United Nations Population Award at UN headquarters in New York, the first Israeli organisation to be given it. The prize was accepted by its lead surgeon, Dr. Lior Sasson.
The charity also raised the money for a new building. The Sylvan Adams Children's Hospital and the Save a Child's Heart International Pediatric Cardiac Center at Wolfson, which Calcalist reported cost about $65 million, has three operating rooms, a pediatric intensive care unit and room for at least 300 heart operations and 400 catheterisations a year. It also serves Israeli children from the surrounding area.
“There are no dollars and cents in it, but it is worth a fortune.”Dr. Amram "Ami" Cohen, founder of Save a Child's Heart, Save a Child's Heart, Our Founder
Who it helps today
By its 30th anniversary in 2025, Save a Child's Heart said it had treated more than 8,000 children from 75 countries, a figure also reported by the Israeli business daily Calcalist that November. The charity says that on average it saves a child's life every 24 hours. About half of its patients come from the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, Iraq and Morocco, and much of the rest from Africa, with others from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas. Its weekly clinic has examined more than 3,000 Palestinian children.
The stories behind the numbers stretch across the map: the first child from Gabon, a girl from Ghana who now hopes to become a nurse, a boy who was the second member of his family to be treated, a child from Uzbekistan who made it the 60th country on the list.
Teaching doctors to heal at home
Cohen understood that flying children to Israel could never reach every child who needed help. So from the start the charity also trained doctors and nurses from the countries its patients came from, with the aim that one day they could treat children themselves. Trainees spend from three months to five years at Wolfson learning cardiology, surgery, anaesthesia, intensive care, perfusion and nursing, under the auspices of Tel Aviv University's medical school and Israel's international development agency, MASHAV.
The charity counts more than 170 medical professionals trained so far. Among them is Dr. Godwin Godfrey, who returned home in 2013 after five years in Israel as Tanzania's first pediatric cardiac surgeon and went on to help establish the country's first pediatric heart programme. Another is Dr. Yayu Mekonnen, described by the charity as Ethiopia's first pediatric cardiac surgeon. In recent years trainees have come from Zambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, the Palestinian Authority and Gaza.
Teams also travel. Save a Child's Heart has run more than 100 surgical, catheterisation and screening missions, examining more than 9,500 children abroad. In 2025 alone its doctors went on missions to Zambia, Rwanda and Tanzania.
The ripples keep spreading
A project coordinator once told a Palestinian mother that the work was like throwing a stone into a pond: treating one child helps a whole family. Thirty years on, the ripples reach parents, siblings and entire hospitals on three continents. At least one former patient has returned with a child of their own. Doctors trained in Holon now treat children in Tanzania and Ethiopia.
As long as children anywhere are born with broken hearts and no surgeon to mend them, the charity says it will keep treating them, training their doctors and raising the standard of care. One surgeon's yes in 1995 has become a promise kept every day.
Sources & further reading
- Save a Child's Heart: Our History, Save a Child's Heart
- Save a Child's Heart: Our Impact, Save a Child's Heart
- Save a Child's Heart CEO Simon Fisher, Calcalist (CTech)
- Sir Prince Ramsey, Guttmacher Institute and Save a Child's Heart recognized with UN Population Award, UNFPA
- Amram Cohen, Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History
- Life-saving surgery for children exposes big heart of Israeli organization, ISRAEL21c
- Save a Child's Heart, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
