From a family bereaved by COVID-19, a heartfelt plea for mutual responsibility

‘Be responsible for each other. From the neighbors to the heads of state, follow the rules,’ urge the relatives of Haim Kimchi, 59, who died last week. Is that too much to ask?

By David Horovitz

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8 October 2020, 11:52 am

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David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

Haim Kimchi passed away on Saturday night, September 26, the night before Yom Kippur. He was 59.

A strong, healthy man, a beloved husband to Orna for 39 years, father, and grandfather to eight from the settlement of Oranim, he died of COVID-19 — to his family’s horrified bafflement, and his own.

** This Editor’s Note was sent out Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The whole family had contracted the virus — they don’t know how or when, Orna and their daughter Natalie have said in several Hebrew television and social media interviews in the past few days, since they were careful to follow the social-distancing and other restrictions. In Haim’s case, his temperature gradually rose until, when it reached 39.5 °C, his doctor ordered him hospitalized. In their last photograph of him, leaving home, he is walking alongside the protective-suited medic. “He didn’t want to go to the hospital,” said Orna. “I knew he’d come back home.”

“We thought he’d have a chest X-ray, be given some medicine, and return,” said Natalie.

Instead, Kimchi’s condition deteriorated, and with it, his spirit. “He told me, I love you. I know that I’ll beat this. I know I’m strong,” said Orna. “But he knew he was in a bad place.” He saw, said Orna and Natalie, that people were leaving the ward in body bags.

Kimchi fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator. In the last two days before he died, his condition stabilized, even improved. There was some optimism from the doctors. Natalie: “Then they called to say we should come…”

The Kimchis, heartbroken, gave their interviews to sound a warning. The virus “truly doesn’t differentiate,” said Natalie. It can take you whatever your medical history, and whatever your age — “the ward had lots of young people seriously ill,” she said.

“And everyone needs to understand that what they do affects others,” she cautioned. “If you don’t keep the rules, you hurt those around you, not only yourself… Be careful. Be responsible for each other. From the neighbors to the heads of state, we have to follow the rules.”

https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/VJN0Yu84-U4CTA3JQ

There’s not much that needs to be added to that message.

It just needs to be heeded.

Acknowledged, internalized and heeded by everyone, everywhere, and not least in an Israel that in recent days has ignominiously led the world, per capita, in new cases and new fatalities (see the video above, which compares global COVID-19 deaths per capita with Israel, at 3.763 per million in early October).

By secular demonstrators against the prime minister.

By that minority of the ultra-Orthodox community — whose contagion rate is drastically higher than the national average — that has embarked upon an irresponsible, unilateral experiment in attaining herd immunity. And the smaller, still more irresponsible extreme anti-Zionist component deliberately ignoring the rules and seeking confrontation with the cops — the better to misrepresent the state as inimical to their iteration of Judaism.

By the head of the Shin Bet, the very agency responsible for tracking virus carriers and those who come into contact with them.

By foolish and evasive legislators and government ministers in Israel — and around the world, where COVID-19 has killed over a million people and continues to confound, to challenge and to devastate.

By leaders in Israel and anywhere else playing politics with the pandemic, maneuvering and manipulating as though this is some kind of election battlefield rather than a medical war.

US President Donald Trump salutes to Marine One from the balcony of the Blue Room of the White House, October 5, 2020, after returning from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland. Trump announced on October 2 he tested positive for COVID-19. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

And, yes, even by US presidents. Especially by US presidents who, having had their hubris and disrespect for these basic life-saving precautions exposed, and having benefited from the privilege of access to the very best medical care, should be the last to minimize the dangers.

They should, rather, be the first to internalize and use their unique platform to disseminate the message delivered by the bereaved family of Haim Kimchi: “If you don’t keep the rules, you hurt those around you, not only yourself… Be careful. Be responsible for each other. From the neighbors to the heads of state, we have to follow the rules.”