Forty-four-year-old Uriel Bulmas from Jerusalem started volunteering for United Hatzalah around 10 years ago.
“My wife had a car accident with my son,” he explained. “The first people who arrived there and took care of them were the first responders of United Hatzalah.”
“In those moments, as I was sick with worry, I knew someone was there,” he added. “This gave me the peace of mind to get to them without going crazy.”
After that experience, Bulmas trained as a medic.
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Today, besides volunteering, he serves as the head of his Hatzalah’s local branch and as the director of the Resilience Care Department.
After the traumatizing events of the infiltration into Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, the Resilience Unit has been playing a critical role in assisting volunteers, security forces, and civilians.
“Our resilience unit has been operating since 2016, and its main role is to give emotional support to our volunteers and to the citizens,” Bulmas said. “United Hatzalah is both a professional organization and a family. We always keep in mind that we must also take care of the same people who are out in the field to save lives.”
Hatzalah’s work in this area is very well-known.
“We provide this assistance also when major catastrophic events occur in Israel and abroad,” Bulmas said, recalling how, for example, Hatzalah’s delegations in the past few years were sent to places like Turkey, Miami, and Puerto Rico.
On October 7, Bulmas was on shift as a first responder in his neighborhood. As he took care of some emergencies, he was told that no ambulance was available to evacuate the patients.
“I wondered where all the ambulances were, and I started to understand that something major was happening,” he said.
Soon, he opened his WhatsApp and read about the war.
“I started to reach out to all our staff and volunteers at the Resilience Unit to put them on high alert,” Bulmas recalled. “We soon found ourselves on the phone with people locked up in their houses in the South, adults, children. We spent four or five hours on the phone with them to give them support.”
Later in the day, Bulmas also went to the South to set up a temporary station of the Resilience Unit in the area.
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“For the first few weeks of the war, we were there 24/7 to give support to our volunteers, to the citizens and the members of the security forces,” he highlighted.
“We also opened our hotline for the volunteers to the general public.”
Today, the center is working on longer-term support for those who need it, including following up with those who were in the field on October 7.
For United Hatzalah, all the volunteers must receive the psychological support they need to avoid the development of post-trauma syndrome.
“For this reason, despite what they witnessed, I believe our volunteers are doing better than other people who were there that day,” Bulmas noted.
United Hatzalah is also assisting the volunteers who were displaced from their homes and who were drafted into the army, as well as their families.
“I think this war has shown something that we see also all year round,” Bulmas said. “Thanks to the fact that our volunteers are really everywhere, we manage to get to where we are needed faster than other emergency organizations. We do not always have the information, but when we do, we get there.”
“On October 7, I was in the field and can testify that we were there by ourselves,” he concluded. “I saw situations where we evacuated nine or 10 people critically wounded in one single ambulance. If we had not been there, who would have done it?”
The Jerusalem Post is proud to partner with United Hatzalah on the Lights and Lifesavers project to honor the October 7 massacre Heroes of Hanukkah. To support the country’s first responders, visit www.jpost.com/lifesavers2023