When someone collapses, the minutes before an ambulance arrives can decide whether they live. United Hatzalah was built on a simple idea: the nearest trained neighbour should get there first.
Stuck in traffic
As a teenager in Jerusalem, Eli Beer volunteered on ambulances. He was born in the city in 1973 and began riding with ambulance crews at 15, fitting the shifts around school and work in his family's businesses. Again and again he watched the same problem: ambulances stuck in the city's traffic and narrow streets arrived too late to help.
Beer knew there was another way. In Brooklyn, Orthodox Jewish volunteers had been running their own emergency service for decades. Called Hatzalah, Hebrew for "rescue", it was founded in Williamsburg by Rabbi Hershel Weber in 1965, according to the organisation's own history, with the aim of getting emergency care to people faster. The idea spread to other Orthodox neighbourhoods in New York, then to other cities and countries. Today Hatzalah describes itself as the largest non-profit ambulance service in the United States, caring for anyone who calls, regardless of race, religion or ability to pay.
Neighbours as first responders
Beer brought the model home and changed it. In 1992 he began working with Hatzalah in Jerusalem, helping build a network of volunteer EMTs, many of them on foot, who could reach emergencies in their own neighbourhoods within minutes. In 2002 one of the volunteers suggested a new tool: a motorcycle carrying the equipment of a small ambulance, able to weave through traffic. The "ambucycle" became the organisation's symbol.
In 2006 Beer brought more than 50 separate local groups together into a single national organisation, United Hatzalah. Two years later it launched Israel's first GPS-based dispatch system, which finds the volunteers closest to an emergency. The service is free to patients and is funded by private donations. As the volunteer network grew, so did the workload: by 2024 its medics were answering more than 700,000 emergencies a year.
Everyone saves everyone
One choice set United Hatzalah apart from the Brooklyn original: it recruits from every part of Israeli society. Its volunteers include religious and secular Jews, men and women, and Muslims, Christians and Druze. In 2018, roughly one volunteer in ten was Muslim, Christian or Druze.
Much of that started with a friendship. In 2007 Murad Alyan, a religious Muslim and registered nurse from Jerusalem, asked Beer to bring the neighbourhood model to the city's largely Arab eastern half, where ambulances could be slowed by traffic and unmarked streets. Alyan recruited the first 34 volunteers. By 2013 he was overseeing more than 100, and the two men shared the Institute of International Education's Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East. They planned to give the $10,000 prize money to the organisation.
“We save lives with no political agenda or opinions.”Murad Alyan, head of United Hatzalah in East Jerusalem, ISRAEL21c, 2013
Seconds that count, every day
United Hatzalah now counts more than 8,600 volunteers, including emergency medical technicians, paramedics and doctors, in 93 branches across Israel, on call around the clock every day of the year, even on Yom Kippur. They respond to more than 2,000 medical emergencies a day, and the organisation says they have answered some seven million calls in all. Its goal is to reach anyone in Israel within 90 seconds. Average response times are under three minutes nationally and about 90 seconds in cities.
About 1,000 volunteers ride ambucycles, and in 2025 the fleet added an electric "ambuscooter" for the tightest streets. Other programmes train women and widows as medics, give regular medical check-ups to elderly people living alone, especially Holocaust survivors, and offer psychological first aid to families and bystanders at the scene of a trauma. That unit has also travelled abroad, supporting communities after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the 2021 building collapse in Surfside, Florida.
Beer himself learned what it means to need help. In March 2020 he caught COVID-19 on a fundraising trip to the United States and spent weeks on a ventilator in a Miami hospital before recovering and returning to Israel.
A model shared with the world
Other countries soon asked for help copying the system. Panama was among the first, and by 2016 Panama City had more than 100 volunteers with ambucycles and ambulances. Groups were also being trained in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and 300 volunteers had enrolled in Lithuania. United Hatzalah also has a chapter in Ukraine.
In 2015 Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first American city to adopt the model. Its version, United Rescue, was set up with Mayor Steven Fulop and run with the Jersey City Medical Center. By 2019 it had more than 100 volunteers, an average response time of about two and a half minutes, and in more than half of its calls a volunteer arrived at least a minute before the ambulance. Mayor Fulop called it "one of the largest success stories that we've had over the last couple of years." One volunteer reached a patient within 90 seconds of the alert; when paramedics arrived, the man already had a pulse.
United Hatzalah teams have also flown to disasters abroad, including Haiti, Nepal in 2015, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, Ukraine and Moldova in 2022, and Morocco in 2023.
Rescue as a shared language
The idea that began on the streets of Williamsburg in the 1960s has travelled a long way: to Jerusalem, to Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods alike, to Panama City and New Jersey. At its heart it asks very little of anyone, just training, a kit bag and the willingness to run towards someone in trouble. Every new volunteer who signs up makes the 90-second promise a little more real.
Sources & further reading
- United Hatzalah of Israel, United Hatzalah
- United Hatzalah, Wikipedia
- Eli Beer, Wikipedia
- Hatzalah's calling: About, Hatzalah
- Peace prize for Jewish and Muslim leaders of United Hatzalah, ISRAEL21c
- Israeli grassroots lifesaving model goes international, ISRAEL21c
- How Brooklyn Sparked an Emergency Rescue Revolution, WNYC
- Life-Saving Volunteerism, City Journal
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.
