A bris milah in the center of the country became an even more emotional event after the mother of the baby and the baby himself nearly died during the delivery.

The incident took place last week and involved a pregnant woman who was in serious condition after she suffered complications with her pregnancy. Rabbi Nir Dorfman serves as a volunteer EMT with United Hatzalah responded to the emergency and gave the woman emergency medical care including intravenous fluid. The woman was then taken to the hospital in serious condition but stable. Due to worries that the infant was lifeless, and an immediate threat to both the woman’s and the infant’s life, she was taken for an emergency operation and doctors surgically removed the infant.

The baby was born without any sign of life, but the doctors and nurses refused to give up and performed CPR on the newborn and succeeded in bringing back a pulse. Soon the baby began breathing.

Retroactively, it became clear that what had saved the life of the mother was the fluids that Rabbi Dorfman gave her, as her blood pressure had dropped to dangerously low levels.

Eight days after the drama had ended, the family held the Bris in their house and invited Rabbi Dorfman, who also volunteers as a mohel for the Bris Yosef Yitzchak organization, to be the mohel for their son. The family expressed their gratitude to him for his prompt assistance which saved the life of mother and child.

Rabbi Dorfman told Kikar Hashabat that “I wasn’t at all optimistic, I was very concerned at the time and then suddenly two days later the mother called me and told me that I had saved her life and the life of her baby son.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)