JERUSALEM – Four months after more than 1,700 United Hatzalah volunteers dropped everything and rushed into the bloody war zone of the October 7th terror attack, a new book shares some of their stories, detailing real life heroism, modern day miracles and true bravery.
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Written by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer, Angels in Orange was released by ArtScroll on January 25th. Two weeks later, the book is already in its second printing, a rarity for any book in the world of Jewish publishing. Its success is a healing balm to United Hatzalah founder and president Eli Beer and his volunteers, who are still reeling from devastation of the bloody rampage.
“At the time, I wasn’t thinking about anything but fighting a war and saving people’s lives,” Beer told VIN News. “But a few weeks later I spoke with Nachman Seltzer, who asked me how I was feeling. I was so depressed and traumatized, and I needed to talk to someone and open up. If I count the 35 years that I have been working to save lives and seeing the worst tragedies, even the Meron tragedy, if you put all that together, it still wouldn’t come close to what we saw on that day.”
Angels in Orange is the first book to be released about October 7th, its 328 pages written, completed and printed in the unlikely time frame of just three months. Far from just documenting the atrocities that United Hatzalah volunteers encountered as they raced through the carnage saving lives, Seltzer kept the narrative hopeful and inspiring.
“We had two volunteers killed and two kidnapped, and I reminded him that not everything ended up as a miracle, but he saw a big miracle,” observed Beer. “We had 1,200 people arriving from outside the region showing up and seeing the worst – terrorists running in front of them, volunteers being shot at – and they all came back. So many miracles happened on that day.”
Beer’s wife Gitty was one of the United Hatzalah volunteers who went into the war zone to provide medical care.
“She went early in the morning when we knew it was a bad, bad situation, with one of our volunteers seriously injured and another killed, but we didn’t know that there were almost 3,000 terrorists,” noted Beer. “If we had, many more people would have died, because we would have had fewer volunteers who were willing to go in. Our volunteers are known to be crazy, which is how we managed to save so many lives.”
Beer has been receiving enthusiastic feedback on Angels in Orange, his second collaboration with Seltzer. ArtScroll Mesorah Heritage Foundation president Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz said that he jumped at the opportunity to publish Angels in Orange which includes the stories of more than two dozen United Hatzalah volunteers.
“We wanted to show the sacrifice these volunteers made, going into the line of fire not thinking, knowing this was their mission – to save lives,” said Zlotowitz. “There is so much negative going around, and we wanted people to be inspired by their stories.”