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WHO WE ARE: Williamsburg Hatzolah Member Saves Woman’s Life Aboard Flight


A Jewish passenger aboard a JetBlue flight heading from New York to Ft. Lauderdale is being hailed as a hero after saving the life of a fellow traveler who suffered a medical emergency mid-air.

As crew members were handing out drinks to passengers roughly an hour into the flight, a woman suddenly fainted in the aisle, prompting the pilot to begin procedures to make an emergency landing. That’s when Naftoli Schischa, a longtime member of Williamsburg Hatzolah, stepped up to the plate.

With passengers crowding around the stricken woman, Schischa – known in Hatzolah circles as “W-18” – proceeded to swiftly and deftly render emergency aid to her, using his skills as an EMT to stabilize the woman enough that the pilots determined that the flight could proceed to its destination.

By the time the aircraft landed, the woman was fully conscious and alert, and a waiting ambulance took her to be transported to a local hospital for treatment.

The story has since gained significant national attention, including an article from Fox News – but not the New York Times, whose entire staff apparently doesn’t have the time to write something nice about the Hasidic community and is instead laser-focused on bashing Hasidic Jews.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)



14 Responses

  1. Me kiamcha yisroel!
    Maybe the stewardesses at Delta should be made to watch the video. Instead of throwing Chassidic passengers off their planes, they should welcome them on?!

  2. A great story. However I think “Saves woman’s life” might be a bit of an overstatement. “Renders Care” might be more accurate from the sound of it ( if her life was really in true danger and he saved her they would have still had to land to get her immediate care). I suppose that’s how they get us to read these articles.

  3. The NY Times will probably write we do something nice and then we go around saying a hundred times, “Mi Kiamca Yisroel”, who else is like us.

  4. Those Hasidims, they’re awful people! They’re so unlearned! They’re so self-centered! Like Naftali Moser said of them: they don’t know anything! Their school system is a failure! The NYT probably would report that he was engaged in pickpocketing someone who had fallen ill on the airplane!

  5. Joseph,

    You’re wrong. He wasn’t wearing anything that identified him as an EMT so what eivah would there be had he done nothing?

    B”H you only pretend to have careers as a nuclear physicist and semiconductor engineer but not in healthcare because your compassion for humanity is simply overwhelming.

  6. I’m surprised they didn’t identify him as a thing or an it. An “it” saw another “it” etc. Or an “it” saw a “thing”…

  7. So I don’t know what Joseph said, but he’s known to be one of the honorary members of the (unfortunately not so select) club that inspired my screen name. So, I’m not surprised to read @gadolhadofi’s comment.

  8. Surely this article is a subtle dig at Fox News, only ironically pretending to implicate the New York Times. There are 25,000 domestic commerical flights every day in the US, and passengers respond to medical emergencies fairly rarely, but still at a rate of once every 600 flights. So this sort of things happens 40 times a day int he United States. I am hardly a frequent flier, but I’ve personally witnessed medically trained passengers stabilize seizuring or collapsed fellow passengers three times. A passenger stabilizing another passenger in flight simply isn’t news. For a “news” agency to say “Hey, wow, a hasidic person did what 40 people from civilized society do every day” may not quite be antisemitic, even by YWN standards, but it is not exactly a glowing review of hasidim to suggest that it is newsworthy when a hasidic person steps up and does what 14,000 “normal” people do every year.

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