Shalom Avitan, Raised in Anti-Zionist Britain, Becomes Outstanding Israel Police Officer

The turning point in Shalom Avitan’s life came on Oct. 7, 2023, when he was serving as a volunteer civilian medic during the Hamas massacre in southern Israel and treated several badly wounded soldiers. Avitan, now 26, recalled treating a badly wounded Israeli reservist in his 30s at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, near the Gaza border. The reservist had been shot in the leg and had shrapnel wounds throughout his body, yet he pushed Avitan against the ambulance and insisted that he treat a more seriously wounded comrade first.

“Then and there I decided to make a switch in my life,” Avitan told JNS in an interview last week. “Out of compassion, camaraderie and altruism, he was willing to give up his own treatment for his friend.”

A few weeks later, Avitan, then 23, walked into an IDF recruitment office. He had spent most of his life studying in yeshiva, and the decision to serve in the military set his life on a radically different course.

The decision was far from expected. Avitan was raised in the United Kingdom in an ultra-Orthodox family and was educated in the Satmar movement, which the report describes as extremist and known for its vehement opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. At his yeshiva in Manchester, he was taught that there could be no Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah, and even the thought of serving in the IDF was considered anathema.

At 18, Avitan moved to Israel to study at a yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, where his English father had met his Israeli mother about 25 years earlier. The family had returned to Manchester shortly after he was born. Two years after arriving in Israel, he decided he was ready for a “change in life” and began working as a medic with the United Hatzalah emergency rescue organization.

On the morning of Oct. 7, Avitan received an urgent call to drive an ambulance south from Jerusalem to meet a unit doctor. He stopped at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon to stock up on supplies and saw corridors filled with patients lying on the floor. After reaching the southern Israeli city of Sderot, he saw rows of bodies in the streets. “We started taking the bodies and making a strip on each body but didn’t have enough paper for that many bodies,” he said. His team was then summoned to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where their ambulance had to zigzag along the main road to avoid running over bodies. There they stopped to help a distraught mother recover her son’s burned body, which she had recognized by his shoes and necklace, Avitan said.

At the hard-hit agricultural community, the team set up a field hospital and “started working like robots.” An Israeli military commander then handed the young medic two 10-month-old twins, telling him that their parents, who had hidden the children in their safe room, had been murdered. Avitan later held the twins for a photograph that was shared by United Hatzalah. For the sake of those who have lost everything, the moment carried a measure of consolation (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). “I knew that this was my mission to take care of the babies,” Avitan said. “It was a very comforting moment amid all the tragedy.”

Source: Read the original report