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This is an ambucycle.

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This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency.

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It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed.

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You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment.

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We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston.

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When I was looking at these pictures,

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it brought me back many years to my past

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when I was a child.

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I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem.

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When I was six years old, I was walking back from school

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on a Friday afternoon with my older brother.

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We were passing by a bus stop.

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we saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes.

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The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed.

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I remembered an old man

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yelling to us and crying to help us get him up.

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He just needed someone helping him.

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We were so scared and we just ran away.

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Growing up, I decided I want to become a doctor and save lives.

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Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child.

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When I was 15, I took an EMT course,

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and I went to volunteer on an ambulance.

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For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem.

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I helped many people,

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but whenever someone really needed help,

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I never got there in time. We never got there.

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The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything.

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We never got there when somebody really needed us.

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One day, we received a call about a seven year old child

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choking from a hot dog.

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Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from

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the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem.

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When we got there, 20 minutes later,

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we started CPR on the kid.

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A doctor comes in from a block away,

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stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR.

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That second he declared this child dead.

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At that moment, I understood

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that this child died for nothing.

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If this doctor, who lived one block away from there,

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would have come 20 minutes earlier,

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not have to wait until that siren he heard before

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coming from the ambulance,

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if he would have heard about it way before,

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he would have saved this child.

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He could have ran from a block away.

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He could have saved this child.

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I said to myself, there must be a better way.

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Together with 15 of my friends

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— we were all EMTs —

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we decided, let's protect our neighborhood,

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so when something like that happens again,

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we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance.

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So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company

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and I told him, "Please, whenever you have a call

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coming into our neighborhood,

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we have 15 great guys who are willing

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to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives.

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Just alert us by beeper.

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We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch

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to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives."

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Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid.

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And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday —

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he was a great guy, but he said to me,

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"Kid, go to school, go open a falafel stand.

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We're not really interested in this kind of new adventures.

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We're not interested in your help." And he threw me out of the room.

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"I don't need your help," he said.

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I was a very stubborn kid.

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As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique

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you've probably all heard of, chutzpah.

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And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners,

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and I said, "The hell with you, if you don't want

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to give me information, I'll get the information myself."

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And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners.

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The next day, while I was listening to the scanners,

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I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year old man

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hurt by a car only one block away from me

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on the main street of my neighborhood.

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I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment.

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When I got there, the 70-year old man

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was laying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck.

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He was on [inaud].

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I knew I have to stop his bleeding or else he will die.

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I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment,

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and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding.

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He was bleeding from his neck.

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When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later,

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I gave them over a patient who was alive.

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(Applause)

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When I went to visit him two days later,

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he gave me a hug and was crying

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and thanking me for saving his life.

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At that moment, when I realized this is the first person

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I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance,

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I knew this is is my life's mission.

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So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah.

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(Applause)

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"Hatzalah" means rescue, for all of you who don't know Hebrew.

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I forgot I'm not in Israel.

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So we have thousands of volunteers

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who are passionate about saving lives,

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and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in,

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they just stop everything to go and run and save a life.

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Our average response time today

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went down to less than three minutes in Israel.

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(Applause)

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I'm talking about heart attacks,

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I'm talking about car accidents,

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God forbid, bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is,

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even a woman three o'clock in the morning

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falling in her home and needs someone to help her.

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Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas

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running to her house and helping her get up.

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The reason why we're so successful are because of three things.

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Thousands of passionate volunteers

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who will leave everything they do

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and run to help people they don't even know.

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We're not there to replace ambulances.

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We're just there

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to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive.

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And we save people that otherwise would not be saved.

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The second reason are because of our technology.

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You know, Israelis are good in technology.

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Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone,

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a GPS technology done by NowForce,

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and whenever a call comes in,

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the closest five volunteers get the call,

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and they actually get there really quick

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and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time.

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And this is a great technology we use all over the country

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and reduce the response time.

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And the third thing are these ambucycles.

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These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels.

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We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them,

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and we save their lives.

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They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk.

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They never, literally, get stuck in traffic.

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That's why we get there so fast.

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A few years after I started this organization,

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in a Jewish community,

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two Muslims from East Jerusalem call me up.

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They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me.

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Muhammad Asli and Morata Leon.

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When Muhammad told me his personal story,

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how is father, 55 years old, collapsed at home,

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had a cardiac arrest,

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and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive,

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and he saw his father die in front of his eyes,

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he asked me, "Please start this in East Jerusalem."

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I said to myself, I saw so my tragedy, so much hate,

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and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims.

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It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people.

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So I went ahead, full force

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— (Applause) —

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and I started United Hatzalah in East Jerusalem,

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and that's why the named United

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and Hatzalah match so well.

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We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs.

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Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs.

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Something special happened.

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Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together,

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but here in this situation,

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the communities, literally,

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it's an unbelievable situation that happened,

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the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest:

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let's save lives together.

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Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers.

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It's an unbelievable concept that could work

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only when you have such a great cause.

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And these are all volunteers.

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No one is getting money.

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They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives.

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When my own father collapsed a few years ago

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from a cardiac arrests, one of the first volunteers

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to arrive to save my father

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was one of these Muslim volunteers from East Jerusalem

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who was in the first course to join Hatzalah.

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And he saved my father.

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Could you imagine who I felt in that moment?

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When I started this organization, I was 17 years old.

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I never imagined that one day I'll be speaking at TEDMed.

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I never even knew what TEDMed is then.

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I don't think it existed, but I never imagined,

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I never imagined that it's going to go all around,

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it's going to spread around,

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and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil.

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All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me,

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passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it.

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And I'm actually starting it in India very soon

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with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back.

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Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew

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years before us in Williamsburg,

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and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York,

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even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities.

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But it could spread everywhere.

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It's very easy to adopt.

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You even saw these volunteers in New York

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saving lives in the World Trade Center.

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Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people.

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42,000 of them were life-threatening situations.

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And we made a difference.

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I guess you could call this a life-saving flash mob,

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and it works.

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When I look all around here,

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I see lots of people who would go an extra mile,

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run an extra mile to save other people,

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no matter who they are, no matter what religion,

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no matter who, where they come from.

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We all want to be heroes.

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We just need a good idea, motivation,

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and lots of chutzpah,

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and we could save millions of people

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that otherwise would not be saved.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)