IsraAID workers give aid to the camps in Haiti.

Israel has so many definitions and meanings in today’s world.

Israel: The name that Jacob was given after wrestling with an Angel of God, according to the Torah.
Israel: A country in the Middle East founded in 1948.
Israel: The homeland of the Jewish people.
Israel: A child born in disaster-ravaged Haiti.

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was struck with a tremendous and devastating earthquake. It lasted approximately 35 seconds and in that short amount of time, destroyed and tore apart homes and lives. It seems cruel and wrong that in only a moment, life for thousands of people was irrevocably altered, and for thousands more, ended. Many who were grievously injured during the event owe their lives to Israel’s speedy dispatch of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. On January 16, amidst the catastrophic aftermath, a Haitian child was born in an Israeli field hospital. His grateful mother named him Israel.

Israel (the country) has a long and strong record of responding with aid in disastrous situations quickly and with great success. One of the IDF’s greatest assets are their search-and-rescue dogs, which are very well trained in detecting signs of life—even through the rubble of collapsed buildings. The dogs have also been deployed in situations suchas the 2006 US Embassy bombing in Kenya. Another unique piece of the team that Israel deployed is the ethics committee, a group tasked with making decisions of grave importance.

While other countries were still organizing their responses to the earthquake in Haiti, Israeli organizations such as IsraAID (an umbrella group which includes Pirchey Refua-Israeli Youth Medical Cadets and Jerusalem AIDS Project) and Magen David Adom, sent aid in the form of volunteers. Magen David Adom has also continued to make strides, along with other members of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), to immunize Haitians against measles and tetanus and diphtheria.

Israel has once again shown how seriously it takes the catastrophes of other nations. The personal stories of the soldiers, medics and volunteers that come out of these events make me proud as a person and as a Jew.

For instance, this excerpt from "My Haitian Experience"--a post on the Magen David Adom website by staff worker, Assaf Chen:
After organizing the equipment [in preparation for a mother’s leg amputation] I gave [her] child a pencil and a piece of paper. The child drew a hospital bed, with his mother lying on it, with only one leg. By one side of the bed there was a child, and on the other—a paramedic, treating the mother. In the center of the paramedic's chest there was a big heart, completely disproportionate to his body, height and head. On the top of the page the boy drew a big sun, shining down on all of us.

Chen goes on to write that nothing he had seen in all his time in Haiti had touched him as much as that child’s drawing. As a teenager, I often hear how the youth have the power to inspire the world and bring it hope. These stories—a child named Israel, a young boy managing to draw what he was feeling—call to mind the lyrics of a Debbie Friedman song for me.

“As I grew up, I came to learn that life was not a game,
That heroes were just people that we called another name.
And the old shall dream dreams, and the youth shall see visions,
And our hopes shall rise up to the sky.
We must live for today; we must build for tomorrow.
Give us time, give us strength, give us life.”

The help and support that Israel has supplied for the distraught Haitian community is truly summed up in the words of Colonel Dr. Ariel Bar, in an interview she gave with NBC. “When we save lives of one person,” he says, “we feel that we save the world, so we save the world several times on this mission.” Keeping the precepts of Judaism in its heart, Israel has once again proven itself an important and beautiful addition to the worldwide community.

Jackie Schicker is a 17-year-old-writer and journalist from Houston, TX. She is known for her hats, love of NFTY-TOR and fascination with all things Jewish.