Media Contact:
Alix Friedman
afriedman@hadassah.org
NEW YORK, NY—First Lady of Israel Michal Herzog will help Hadassah mark the one-year anniversary of October 7 when she participates in the memorial program “Honor. Mourn. Remember. Together We Will Heal.” on Sunday, October 6, from 6:30 pm - 7:15 pm EST. The program will pay homage to the fallen, the wounded and a nation still reeling from the trauma of one of the worst days in its history. Veteran American-Israeli journalist Maayan Hoffman, editor-in-chief of ILTV Israel News and host of the podcast Hadassah On Call: Frontiers in Medicine, will serve as MC for the free, pre-recorded event, which the public is invited to join by registering here.
In addition to Michal Herzog, the program will feature Hadassah National President Carol Ann Schwartz and Asaf Ilan, an IDF soldier who suffered severe wounds for which he was treated at the Hadassah Medical Organization, Hadassah’s hospital system in Jerusalem. International cantor Shlomo Mark Samowitz will sing the IDF's memorial prayer and teens from Israel and abroad – many from Ukraine – will sing “Hatikva” at Hadassah's Meir Shfeya Youth Village. Alumni from Hadassah’s youth villages are among the soldiers killed in battle, and the villages are serving as refuges for teens displaced from their homes.
In the year since the invasion, massacre and kidnapping, Hadassah has been relentless in demanding that the international community hold Hamas accountable and equally unremitting in supporting Israel.
In February, Hadassah launched End The Silence, a global campaign to raise awareness of Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The campaign spurred more than 150,000 advocates from 118 countries and 119 organizations to sign Hadassah’s petition demanding that UN Secretary-General António Guterres seek justice for the Israeli women and girls subjected to horrific sexual crimes on and after October 7. Hadassah has repeatedly called out the UN for its refusal to launch an independent, unbiased investigation of those crimes, its failure to bring about the hostages’ release and, most recently, its passage of a resolution that effectively denies Israel the right to defend itself.
Across the world in Jerusalem, surgeons at the Hadassah Medical Organization have pioneered advances in personalized orthopedics, robotics and 3D technology in order to treat casualties with unusually complex wounds. And to ensure that patients whose bodies were repaired with such skill have access to the best rehabilitation services possible, the hospital system accelerated the phased opening of its $137 million, 323,000-square-foot, multi-story Gandel Rehabilitation Center, which welcomed its first patients, 72 war casualties, in January.
When finished, the Gandel center will care for 10,000 patients a year. That will go a long way toward addressing Greater Jerusalem’s, and Israel’s, acute shortage of rehab beds, a longstanding crisis that has been brought into sharp relief and exacerbated by the war. Last month, the Ministry of Defense reported that more than 10,000 soldiers had been wounded since October 7 and that 35% of them were grappling with PTSD or other psychological disorders. The Ministry said that by 2030, it expects there to be ten times that number of wounded, or 100,000, with 50% of them suffering from mental disorders.
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About the Hadassah Medical Organization:
For more than a century, the Hadassah Medical Organization, the Jerusalem-based hospital system founded and owned by Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, has set the standard for excellence in medical treatment and research in Israel. The experience and ingenuity of Hadassah’s doctors and scientists have led to new tools and treatments in all areas of medicine, including therapeutics, diagnostic medical devices and digital health.