Twenty-five year old Haran Yaffe smiles. “It’s a miracle I’m alive,” he says. “I was the most severely wounded soldier during the second Lebanese War. They said my chances were slim, but here I am. They said I’d never walk, and now I dance. They said I’d never play my music again, and…” He takes up his guitar, and his eyes smile as his fingers move confidently over the strings.
“The surgeons saved my life, but the therapists at the Reuth Medical Center have saved my reason for living: my music,” says Haran, who grew up in Amirim, the musical stronghold of the Galilee in the 1980s, and was, in fact, working on his first album when he was called up on August 6, 2006. Haran’s family proudly acknowledges their arrival in Israel after the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion, and traces their roots to the Pinto and Angel families.
A reserve soldier in the Combat Engineering Corps, Haran was wounded when a Hezballah missile hit his armored vehicle in southern Lebanon. He was evacuated by helicopter and arrived at Rambam Hospital in critical condition. He remained comatose for 10 days, “until they played my song on the radio, and the DJ, responding to my sister’s request, said: ‘Haran, wake up. Haran, wake up…’”
He was alive, but the long road to full recovery and rehabilitation still stretched ahead.
“About six months later, while battling to return to a semblance of normalcy, I heard there was a rehabilitation hospital in Tel Aviv called the Reuth Medical Center,” he says. “I didn’t want to go there. ‘It’s for old people,’ I said to my mother. Fortunately, she insisted, and I agreed to try it out, just once. I called her the very same day: ‘You won’t believe it! Reuth is a different world! They really care!’ I shouted over the phone.” And for Haran, caring is the key word that makes Reuth so different from other places. “Elsewhere you are treated as just another case,” he says. “But at Reuth you’re a human being. Everybody— doctors, therapists, nurses, secretaries—are just so incredibly nice!”
Haran is one of 1,400 soldiers treated at the Reuth Medical Center over the past year. Five times a week (“It’s like a job,” he jokes), he visits the Mercaz Norma Day Rehabilitation Center for physiotherapy and occupational therapy. “When I first came here, my fingers were folded into a fist and my hand didn’t function at all,” he says, holding out a fine-looking hand that appears completely normal. “Today I play the guitar, not as well as I used to just yet, but I know I’ll get better. Ultimately I’ll be a much better musician than I was, I’m sure of it. That’s how it has to be.”
And so, with over 100 pieces of shrapnel scattered throughout his body, with a song on his guitar and in his heart, and with the untiring support of the team at Reuth, Haran has returned to the place he left on his way to the battlefield—the recording studio.
Reuth is one of Israel’s oldest and largest non-profit organizations. Today, as it celebrates 70 years of activity and contribution, Reuth is one of Israel’s leading nonprofits in the fields of health, welfare and the elderly. It owns and operates the 310 bed Reuth Medical Center, the largest and most advanced rehabilitation and chronic care hospital in the Tel Aviv area. The organization also runs three senior citizens’ homes, community housing projects for needy seniors, a national information center, day centers for the elderly and many other programs, all designed to care for the most needy. In all its operations, Reuth strives to collaborate with institutions within the community, for the benefit of the entire Israeli public.
Reuth is firmly grounded in the Jewish heritage, in which an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding prevails. Holidays and the Sabbath are special occasions. Aesthetics of optimism and hope are another Reuth hallmark.
For more information call Dr. Anita I. Jacobs, the new Executive Director of Reuth USA at (212) 751 9255. Reuth, 390 Fifth Avenue, suite 900, New York, NY 10018.
