In shadow of Holocaust and war, Arab doctors find shared humanity in caring for survivors
Volunteering for nonprofit LeMa’anam, Christian Yosif Boulos and Muslim Fadi Badarna provide home visits for elderly who lived through horrors decades ago and in wake of October 7
Reporter at The Times of Israel
KIRYAT BIALIK – Finishing up the first of a series of examinations at the home of Chana Sandouvsky, two volunteer eye doctors – one Christian and one Muslim – stopped to peer at the faded bluish number, A14147, that had been tattooed on the 98-year-old’s arm in Auschwitz.
It was the week before Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began Wednesday night, and Dr. Yosif Boulos, 35, a Christian, was supervising Dr. Fadi Badarna, 31, a Muslim.
The pair, who work together at Carmel Hospital in Haifa, were at Sandouvsky’s home as volunteers for the nonprofit LeMa’anam (“For their sake” in Hebrew), which provides free home healthcare visits to Holocaust survivors.
With the memory of the recently ended war against Hezbollah still fresh in the minds of residents of Kiryat Bialik and other areas around Haifa that had suffered dozens of rocket attacks, the volunteer visits of two Arab doctors in the homes of Holocaust survivors seemed especially “symbolic,” said Boulus, “because it’s a symbol of coexistence that should be here in Israel.”
For Badarna, it was the first time he had seen one of those infamous tattoos up close or heard a Holocaust survivor recount their story in person. While he was offering his medical expertise, he said, he received something special in return.
“Meeting these people, hearing their stories, and being able to help — even in a small way — is a great privilege,” Badarna told a Times of Israel reporter accompanying the doctors on their rounds. “Medicine for me is not just a profession but a way to express solidarity, humanity and hope for a better future for all of us.”
According to the Israeli Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority, 123,715 Holocaust survivors were living in Israel as of January 2025. Most were younger than 18 during World War II. Now, they are among the country’s oldest citizens.
LeMa’anam was born in 2020 when Dr. Tamara Kolitz became aware of the challenges for homebound and isolated Holocaust survivors amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tel Aviv-Sourasky Medical Center and Maccabi Healthcare Services endocrinologist asked some of her colleagues if they would volunteer for house visits, launching the effort.
Since then, the nonprofit has grown to about 1,500 medical volunteers – including doctors, occupational therapists, and social workers – who have provided more than 12,000 treatments. A call center, opened in November 2020, is staffed by medical students to answer questions.
The organization is supported by the Claims Conference, private donors, and funds from Israel’s National Insurance Institute.
‘We don’t get to decide’
Riding around Haifa’s suburbs in a bright yellow LeMa’anam van driven by Aviv Paz, manager of LeMa’anam’s countrywide mobile clinic, the doctors stopped at the sunny Kiryat Bialik apartment of Nissim Daito, who was born in Tunisia in 1935.
The Germans, who occupied Tunisia from November 1942 through May 1943, sent Daito and his parents – among some 5,000 other Jews – to one of the many Nazi labor camps in Tunisia, where dozens of prisoners died. After surviving the war, Daito and his family moved to Israel in 1950.
The 90-year-old’s daughter, Ziva Balmas, sat next to her father during the doctors’ visit. She recounted his years-long journalism career with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and his later work as a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Paris, where he utilized his fluency in French.
But now, sitting in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, Daito was quiet and withdrawn.
Balmas said that Daito was in mourning. Balmas’s mother, Daito’s wife of 47 years, passed away in January. His grandson, Omer Nissim Bitan, 22, a soldier in the 5th Brigade from Binyamina, was killed by a Hamas missile strike on Kibbutz Nirim just a week after the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 into Gaza.
“My father always tells me, ‘I shouldn’t be alive, my grandson should be alive,’” Balmas said, out of her father’s earshot. “But I tell him that we don’t get to decide.”
Thinking of the hostages in Gaza
As soon as the two eye doctors walked into Sandouvsky’s apartment in another part of Kiryat Bialik, she looked up from her wheelchair and told them, “It makes me feel so good that you’re here.”
“How are you?” the doctors asked.
“I’m 98,” she replied. “I have old age but no happiness.”
“We’ll come celebrate together when you reach 100,” Badarna said.
Her small apartment was decorated with art on the walls and photos of her family, which includes two great-granddaughters. A Philippine aide, Loniza Tolentino, has lived with Sandouvsky for the past six years and calls her “Savta,” Hebrew for grandma.
With the TV on mute in the background, Sandouvsky began talking about the 59 hostages in Gaza, which brought her back to her experiences in the Holocaust.
“It’s not the same, but it’s the same,” Sandouvsky said. “We got a small piece of bread each day. Then we had to walk 18 kilometers each day to cut trees for 12 hours.”
“How old were you?” Badarna asked.
“I was 16,” she replied. “We walked with two left shoes or two right shoes. If they were too big, that was good. If they were too small, that wasn’t good. All I had was a dress, and if it rained, I wore a wet dress. I was the only one who survived in my family…”
She trailed off before adding, “That’s just a little of my life.”
Badarna thanked her for sharing “a page” of her life story.
After leaving her apartment, however, he added in a distraught voice that it was “shocking” to hear what she had gone through.
“At least we did her some good,” said Boulus, who had prescribed some vitamins for her to preserve her eyesight.
Boulus, who grew up in Kafr Yasif and now lives in Haifa, said he started volunteering with LeMa’anam two years ago, after speaking to several volunteers at a medical conference.
The Holocaust survivors, he explained, “need someone to pay attention to them and give them a bit of satisfaction, which is rare. Even coming into their house helps them because they don’t get a lot of visitors.”
Boulos explained that as a doctor, he doesn’t “judge people by their religion, I see them as human beings.”
Packing for ‘three days’
The final stop of the day was at the apartment of Henia Hirsh, 90, who moved to Israel in 1962 from a small town in Romania, near Sighet.
“That’s where my grandfather came from,” Paz told her. “He was in the same class as Elie Wiesel.”
Germans arrived in Sighet in 1944, forcing the town’s approximately 10,000 remaining Jews into a ghetto before sending them to Auschwitz. Hirsh recounted being told by authorities that her family needed to leave their home and pack belongings for three days.
“That turned into a lot of years,” she said. “When we returned to our house, there wasn’t anything left.”
The doctors spoke to Hirsh in a mixture of Romanian, Hebrew, Arabic and Yiddish, which Badarna was able to understand some of thanks to his time in medical school in Germany.
After examining her eyes, he made an appointment for her to get new eyeglasses.
Badarna, who is from Sakhnin, a predominantly Muslim town in the Galilee, said that his mother volunteers at a local day center where she reads books and does activities with the elderly.
“As the son of a mother who raised us with values of respect, mutual help, and sensitivity to others, I feel that every encounter is also an opportunity to honor the way I was brought up,” he said. “In challenging times like these, when the reality of life is complex and not simple for all of us, there is a special value in simple human encounters that remind us of what we have in common.”
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