From COVID-19 to October 7, making connections that last a lifetime

As someone who’s lived in Israel, I didn’t know what to expect when I joined Momentum’s Healthcare Heroes mission in 2021. I knew something in my life was missing, yet I didn’t know what it was. 

Momentum, an organization that empowers Jewish mothers to lead a Jewish future by cultivating a community of like-minded individuals who are invested in giving back and being a powerful voice for advocacy and action in the Jewish world, helped me figure out what that was. 

From taking part in trips to Israel, to leadership summits around the world, and a comprehensive online network of resources and examples of how participants have enriched their own local Jewish communities, Momentum showed me many ways to be part of something bigger than myself. 

 So when I joined their mission of Jewish mothers who are also healthcare professionals, at a time when the world was still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a transformative experience for me both personally and professionally that helped me put a finger on what was lacking in my life. 

During that visit, I saw Israel in a different light. Suddenly, I felt an inexplicable connection to women who were living my exact life, but an ocean away. We all went through the pandemic and carried various trauma from experience. There, I looked into the eyes of so many women – both Israeli and American – who were pushed to the brink and yet never cowered from their duty to heal. 

Now that we’re marking almost five years since the pandemic broke out, it’s easy to forget how unnerving that time was. But as a pediatric critical care physician, when I met with these women, I understood the stresses they faced, the overwhelming uncertainty of the moment, and the anxiety associated with coming to work each day.

While my hectic work schedule and long hours often limits my regular participation in the community, I try to contribute when I can. I was the medical representative in the “Save a Life” programs which involved opioid danger awareness and education in the Jewish community that reached our local Jewish teens, parents, grandparents, and college students by working with the Hillel at the University of Central Florida and Congregation Ohev Shalom. 

However, despite those efforts, it was Momentum that taught me how to become more connected to Judaism. Even though I belonged to a conservative synagogue, Congregation Ohev Shalom, I was still searching for ways to make a more significant contribution to my community. My Momentum experience helped me understand where I fit in as a small — but meaningful — piece of fabric in the tapestry of our local Jewish community in Orlando. During my Momentum experiences, I was exposed to so many valuable connections of formidable women – both here in the US and in Israel – that I knew I had to treasure these contacts and find ways to cultivate my relationships with them, not just for myself but for our respective communities.

My fellow Momentum mission participant (and former college roommate!), Dr. Traci Portnoff, too, was moved by this instant connection of solidarity we had with our Israeli peers and we decided to needed to leverage this network of Jewish healthcare professionals so we could not only maintain that very much needed connection between Israel and the Diaspora, but also so we can ensure that these women know there’s someone out there to support them when they’re batteries of empathy have run out.

Then October 7 happened, and like the rest of the Jewish world, we had to pivot and figure out how our mission can encompass the unimaginable sense of loss and grief our Israeli peers felt in that moment and ever since. 

As such, in July of 2023, our non-profit, NeshamaCare, was born. Our goal is to build a community for Jewish women in healthcare with a focus on strengthening their Jewish identity, and their connection to Israel and to each other. Our overall goal is to provide a network of healthcare professionals who can support, inspire and educate each other.

Our nascent organization started out small and, a year later, we funded a cohort of healthcare professionals — both Israeli and American — to attend one of Momentum’s solidarity missions this year to offer support to the victims of October 7. As another response to October 7, we created NeshamaCare Connect, an online programming platform designed to bring women together so they can remain connected to their Israeli colleagues.

In 2025, we hope to hold a retreat for Jewish American healthcare professionals here so we can learn how we can support each other in times of such tumult and rising antisemitism across the country. After all, how can we heal others if we ourselves feel broken?  

Momentum, which brings Jewish parents — primarily mothers — from all over the world to Israel, created this network for us and provided us with the tools and resources. With NeshamaCare, this is our way to give back and leverage what they’ve given us, so we make a meaningful difference in our communities back home. 

The trips organized by Momentum are like lightning in a bottle, where everything miraculously falls into place and women who were once strangers become sisters. We hope to recreate that magic on a consistent basis and on a national scale.

To that end, we’ve also embarked on smaller initiatives — like having our American participants draft letters to Israeli healthcare professionals after October 7. As we in America were just beginning to wrap our heads around what happened that horrific day, these women were there in the figurative trenches, counting the dead, healing the wounded and comforting the traumatized. 

In moments like these, words can seem hollow, but it’s all we had to offer in those early days. And so, we wrote, and when we went to Israel in July, we hand-delivered these letters to our Israeli participants. Together, we wept. 

At that moment, I realized they needed us just as much as we needed them. 

It’s clear that there’s still much more we can do, but for now, we want to make sure that the women who devote so much of their lives to caring for others have someone who cares for them in return. 

Accordingly, one of our visions at NeshamaCare is to inspire our participants to lead, be changemakers, and take action in their own communities. In the near future, I hope to be able to engage women in the healthcare profession in the Orlando area to provide and lead health education initiatives and/or other programs in our community.

The experience I felt in those days when I visited Israel during the pandemic only intensified after October 7, when every hug mattered, every word uttered carried significant weight, and every connection we made to our Jewish sisters in Israel is one we’d treasure for a lifetime.