Laniado Hospital, also known as the Sanz Medical Center, is a voluntary, not-for-profit hospital in Kiryat Sanz, Netanya, Israel, serving a regional population of over 450,000 in Netanya and the Sharon plain. Opened in 1975 by Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, the first Klausenburger Rebbe, Laniado Hospital is run according to Jewish law and is known as the only hospital in Israel which has never closed due to a strike. It is administered by the Sanz-Klausenburg Hasidic dynasty under the direction of the present Sanz-Klausenburger Rebbe in israel, Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Halberstam.
Though it is not a major emergency-care center, Laniado served a critical role as a triage hospital during more than 20 Netanya-area suicide bombings and terrorist attacks in the Second Intifada. The worst of these was the 2002 Passover massacre at the Park Hotel, located three minutes from the hospital. Laniado also treated wounded soldiers from the First and Second Lebanon War. Hospital personnel have developed an emergency preparedness protocol that regularly updates surgeons, trauma specialists, cardiologists and pediatricians on their roles during an emergency.
Origin
The vision for establishing the hospital originated during the Holocaust, when Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam experienced the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis firsthand. At the cornerstone-laying for Laniado's second building in 1980, he told the assemblage in Yiddish: I was saved from the gas chambers, saved from Hitler. I spent several years in Nazi death camps. Besides the fact that they murdered my wife and 11 children, my mother, my sisters and my brother — of my whole family, some 150 people, I was the only one who survived — I witnessed their cruelty. I remember as if it were today how they shot me in the arm. I was afraid to go to the Nazi infirmary, though there were doctors there. I knew that if I went in, I'd never come out alive. … Despite my fear of the Nazis, I plucked a leaf from a tree and stuck it to my wound to stanch the bleeding. Then I cut a branch and tied it around the wound to hold it in place. With God's help, it healed in three days. Then I promised myself that if, with God's help, I got well and got out of there, away from those resha'im (wicked people), I would build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity. And the basis of that hospital would be that the doctors and nurses would believe that there is a God in this world and that when they treat a patient, they are fulfilling the greatest mitzvah in the Torah.
History
The Rebbe began working towards his goal two years after founding the Hasidic community of Kiryat Sanz in northern Netanya. In 1958 he laid the cornerstone for a hospital, although he had no capital, no fund-raising apparatus, and no building permit. He petitioned the authorities for the permit, but the left-wing Minister of Health refused, reportedly offering Halberstam the job of supervising religious activities at government hospitals instead. In 1962 the leftist party which controlled the Health Ministry suddenly quit the government coalition and the ministry was given to the Torah-observant Hapoel HaMizrachi party. One day the deputy health minister, Yitzhak Rafael, and other officials visited the Rebbe in Netanya. After the meeting, the Rebbe called Rafael aside and asked him to use his position to help other Torah-observant Jews. Two days later, the building permit arrived in the mail.
The Rebbe spent 15 years personally fund-raising for his hospital in North and South America. Whenever he collected some money, he would continue building. In 1963 he received his first major donation in the form of a $300,000 bequest from the estate of Alfonse and Yaakov Avraham Laniado, Swiss bankers who had willed their money to health and educational institutions in Israel. The Rebbe decided to name the new hospital after the Laniado brothers. In 1972, a $500,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development helped complete the electrical, plumbing and elevator systems. Now the only thing lacking was an operating permit, which the government was still loath to supply. The Minister of Health at the time claimed that permits had already been granted to three hospitals in the Netanya area, but Sidney Greenwald, the first chairman of the American Friends of Laniado Hospital, convinced him to issue one to the Klausenburger Rebbe, too. In the end, Laniado was the only hospital opened in Netanya.
