By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Organized by Partnership2Gether, the weeklong trip – dubbed Medical Mission 2025 — continued our decades long bond with the Western Galilee region while giving participants a first-hand view of how GMC is emerging from many months of what amounts to a war footing. Only recently has the hospital — which had been functioning amid a fully staffed underground facility, safe from Hezbollah rockets — returned to some degree of above-ground normalcy.
“The premise was to get physicians to Israel to get credentialed and learn the medical system,” Elisburg explained, “so that in the future if another thing happened, they’d know that system.”
Elisburg’s group encompassed a wide array of specialties — at least one visiting surgeon assisted on the OR. While pediatricians weren’t exactly in acute demand (Elisburg was one of two on the trip), the experience proved valuable for its insights into how a hospital can function effectively even under the most challenging circumstances.
There were other, less concrete priorities. “My feeling was that it was the same reason every trip goes to Israel right now: to have solidarity with the people, and to come back as an ambassador. We talked to a lot of doctors and residents — emotional conversations. The mental health support as probably the most valuable thing.”
In an amusing coincidence, the trip’s other pediatrician “happened to be someone I’ve known since kindergarten,” Elisburg said, explaining that she and “Mike” both grew up in Potomac, Maryland, and that he’s “an Orthodox Jew with seven kids” who now works in a Denver suburb.
Elisburg had previously sought to gain Israeli medical credentials, an effort that became bogged down in a bureaucratic morass. “There was a process of submitting your license, your residency, med school – the same way you’d get credentialed at any hospital” – except the Israeli authorities were insisting on paper copies – a somewhat retrograde requirement in 2024.
Despite the tangled thickets of officialdom, Elisburg was still able to gain valuable insights into how her Israeli counterparts practice medicine.
“They talked about things like fevers of unknown origin in babies under three months old, so we were discussing what they do in Israel and what we do, like what kind of lab work. It’s different there with socialized medicine. That generated a lot of conversations about medical systems,” including confessions that “not everybody wants to live in the North – it’s a little more remote; maybe the cities aren’t bigger. So they have incentives to get residents to work in rural areas with smaller hospitals.”
Elisburg had visited the region previously while on a trip organized by Momentum; and in her capacity leading Louisville’s Hadassah chapter. Last August she returned on her own, when besides making Hadassah connections, she spent a week volunteering with the Israel Defense Forces.
At that time Hezbollah was a daily threat, forcing several planned activities to be scuttled at the last minute. “It was dangerous,” she acknowledged, recalling how the GMC was functioning while fully underground.
The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, signed on November 17, 2024, allowed the hospital to resume normal operations. Even so, before the January visit “we had to sign all sorts of waivers, because you were going into a war zone.”
Elisburg arrived to find an atmosphere of anxiousness among GMC personnel. “They were grateful to be above ground, but many of them are still displaced from their homes and can’t go back.”
Sobering concerns were never far away. She and members of her group “did a mass casualty-event training,” observing how a medic unit at a nearby army base would treat battlefield wounds, complete with a simulated helicopter evacuation.
A few areas were deemed safe enough for residents to return to their homes. Others, however, “are choosing not to because they have children in school” elsewhere, and don’t want to disrupt already fragile routine.
Perhaps the happiest interlude came when Elisburg spent time with Shahrazad Bargout Swidan — one of four “Women Leading a Dialogue” Arab and Israeli representatives who visited Louisville this past December. They’d met after Swidan spoke at The Temple, reuniting at her family’s temporary apartment in Nahariya.
“They’re living there until they can go back” to their home in the North, Elisburg said. “Nobody’s lived there for 15 months.”
Elisburg also visited with another Women Leading a Dialogue member, Karin Nathans Gefen, whose family was living on a kibbutz after a previous stay in the city of Tiberias.
“Not to get too political,” Elisburg said, “but I got into a lot of conversation. “I asked her, ‘What do you think about the Palestinians?’ She was, like, ‘I am not a Palestinian – I am an Arab Israeli!’”
For Elisburg, these reconnections proved mutually “therapeutic.”
“Someone came from the outside world, came to enjoy their company, came to their homes, asked about their stories and wanted to hear what their lives were like – their experience of being displaced.”
Throughout that week, an observer might reasonably ask: Is there any true sense of hope among Israelis living in the Western Galilee?
“I think they are realistic,” Elisburg said. “But hopeful, which is a little different from optimism. There’s a spirit of, ‘We’re going about our business, and stuff could happen, but we’re just going to live our lives.’”