Healing the Soul: Honoring Captain Alon Safrai Z”L

Alon Safrai was a medical student and an IDF Armored Corps officer who fell in Lebanon a few months ago. He wanted to dedicate his life to public health and gave his life in love for the people of Israel. Restoring the synagogue where his father prays will honor his memory and make it a worthy place for prayer and love for Israel.

Alon was a talented, beloved, and loving fourth-year medical student at the Technion. On October 7, like many Israelis abroad, he returned from a trip to the Far East to enlist. Volunteering was a way of life for him: from a young age, he volunteered for Magen David Adom and Latet (in Hebrew, To Give) organization. He was an Armored Corps officer in the reserves, and despite being exempted from service as a medical student, he insisted on continuing to serve – he fought and never returned. Alon did not fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor in Israel.

I was also a medical student once. When I started studying in Paris, a few decades ago, I also dreamed of becoming a doctor in Israel. Thanks to the many who helped me along the way, I was able to fulfill my dream. I am grateful to the students I taught as a teacher at Hadassah. Many became doctors and teachers, and I am moved when someone remembers a course I taught on Evidence-based Medicine as being particularly important in training. More than anyone else, medical students prepared me to be the doctor and teacher I dreamed of.

Alon did not get to fulfill his dream, but we can perpetuate his memory and continue his desire to do good in the world. His family and friends have already donated in his memory an emergency care ambulance and a motorcycle to save lives. Another memorial is dedicated to restoring a synagogue where Alon’s father prays with us in the morning. According to our sources, “the Gates of Tears are never closed.”

This is one of the oldest synagogues in the old Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. Part of the structure is made of asbestos, which should be removed, as in the event of an explosion or fire, the dispersion of asbestos fibers could become an ecological disaster (as happened in a synagogue in Lod during the riots a few years ago). Alon wanted to dedicate his life to public health and gave his life to the love of the people of Israel. This commemoration will honor Alon’s dream for public health and make the Mikdash Mehat (Hebrew for “small Temple”) a place worthy of prayer and love of Israel.

Our country has experienced so much bereavement and loss in the past year and a half. Commemoration is a healing for the soul, typical of a Jewish answer to loss. A response to the absurd is Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for “World Repair”), argues philosopher Prof. Avi Sagi in his book Or Mitoch Hasedek, according to a variety of secular and religious thinkers – such as Albert Camus, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Prof. Jonathan Sachs. This is probably a profound truth if many sources reach the same conclusion. Creative activity as a response to disaster was a basis for the birth of the State of Israel after the Holocaust, and now for its reconstruction after October 7 – as organ donation, out of pain and brokenness, gives life and hope.

A response to the absurd is Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for “World Repair”) , whether from a secular-humanist perspective exemplified by Albert Camus, one of the leaders in the philosophy of the absurd (1), or from a religious Jewish perspective, as Rabbi Prof. Jonathan Sachs wrote (2).

In his book The Plague, about a deadly epidemic that hints at the Nazi takeover, Camus discusses the question of how a person deals with devastation and loss? The book’s hero is a doctor who fights to save lives – facing a priest who believes that everything is decree from Heaven. Camus probably drew inspiration for this character from his doctor, who helped Jews and fought with the French Resistance against the Nazis until they executed him. *

Alon fought Evil with dedication and in the best tradition of doctors who sacrificed everything for the betterment of the world, similar to Camus’s doctor in France and Janusz Korczak, the orphanage doctor in the Warsaw ghetto who refused an offer to be rescued alone and abandon the children on their way to Treblinka, because he said, “You don’t leave a sick child alone at night and you don’t abandon children at such an hour.”

It is a privilege and an obligation to forever remember Alon, May G-d Avenge Him, as a model of dedication. The initiative to commemorate Alon Z”L with the restoration of a synagogue has already been supported by many, both religious and secular. Anyone who would like to express gratitude and give a hug to the Safrai family is invited to donate through the website Jgive.com – look for “Captain Alon Safrai” https://www.jgive.com/new/en/ils/donation-targets/143164

The late actress Anat Gov said in her latest interview (“Yediot Aharonot”, 12/14/2012): “If you wake up every morning and ask, ‘Where is my happiness? What about me? When is my turn? Do I deserve it? Don’t I deserve it? Me and me and me, chances are you will be very unhappy. But if you wake up in the morning and ask, ‘How can I make the other person happy?’, you may get a small piece of happiness. Studies show that Anat was right: the key to happiness is in giving (3, 4). We, doctors, know this: that’s why we chose this profession.

* I thank my sister-in-law and brother, Leah Zahavi and her husband David Brezis, Z”L, for this insight. A few years ago, they visited Chambon, a village in central France known for having saved Jews: all its residents received the title Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem. Leah’s mother was hidden there by a doctor named Roger le Forestier, a humanist who worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, was a key figure in the Resistance, and paid for it with his life, along with 100 other fighters captured and murdered by the Gestapo in 1944. According to David, a professor of philosophy who was careful in his words, a reasonably well-founded hypothesis among researchers is that this doctor treated Camus and served as a model for the hero of his novel The Plague.

This essay was published in Hebrew in a website for physicians: https://doctorsonly.co.il/2025/04/342047/

References

1. Sagi A. Albert Camus and the philosophy of the absurd. 1st ed. Value inquiry book series v 125. Rodopi; 2002:vi, 193 pages.
2. Sacks RJ. Mending the World. Jewish Political Studies Review. 2013;25(3/4):108-118.
3. Dunn, EW et al. Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science 2008, 319:1687.
4. Post, SG. Rx it’s good to be good: Prescribing volunteerism for health, happiness, resilience, and longevity. American Journal of Health Promotion 2017, 31:163.