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Israeli doctor talks about his work helping Syrian victims
By Bruce Walton
YOUNGSTOWN
Arie Eisenman wanted to be a doctor for as long as he could remember, never considering any other profession in his life.
As a man so dedicated to providing health care to those in need, he’s glad he works in a place serving the kind of people who need it more than most: Syrians.
Dr. Eisenman sat in with Louie Free’s Vindy Radio Talk Show on Friday morning as a part of his visit to the Youngstown area and talked about the work he and his emergency department staff have done at the Galilee Medical Center helping Syrian victims.
Dr. Eisenman is on a tour as a part of the Partnership 2gether Summit – an international program that pairs cities and communities in the U.S. and Europe with one in Israel.
The GMC has roughly 800 beds and a staff of 2,600 employees serving an annual number of 60,000 Jewish and non-Jewish people in the city of Nahariya. The GMC is 6 miles from the Lebanese border, the closest hospital to any border in Israel, to make it easier for those in need to reach them.
The emergency room, which Dr. Eisenman oversees, gets about 120,000 visits annually, compared with the average American ER, which has 20,000 visits annually.
“It’s really a unique sample of ... people working together in harmony for many years now,” he said.
The fact that Syrians are coming to GMC shows how dire the situation is to Dr. Eisenman.
“Appealing to the Israelis, for a Syrian, means making a pact with the devil. It’s something unheard of,” he said.
Many of his patients come in as victims of the Syrian war, suffering from ballistic injuries – sometimes infected – from high-velocity weaponry such as rifles. For confidentiality, the center doesn’t ask for identification – they assign nicknames and numbers to keep track of them, Dr. Eisenman said.
The center has most likely provided care for refugees and even ISIS soldiers. The GMC takes a humanitarian health care approach, referring to their slogan: “Person-to-person medicine.”
“That means you don’t really care, and you don’t look inside in order to know who you are taking care of,” he said.
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, many victims have suffered from injuries from the warfare, including women, children and infants. The GMC began two years after the conflict broke out as a humanitarian health care effort for Syria.
Though he can’t say for certain what his patients say about GMC after they leave, Dr. Eisenman hopes they spread the word everyone is welcome to his center.