Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jewish Mom Creates App For College Students Needing Emergency Services

After her college-age daughter needed to go to the emergency room but didn’t have a way to contact her, a Jewish mother helped to create an app that stores such information and also provides other services college students may need in a serious situation.

Gail Schenbaum Lawton was inspired to develop the app, called Umergency, after her daughter Alex’s thumb nearly had to be amputated after an accident but Gail was unable to contact her during her hospitalization. The app’s website estimates that nearly one in four college students end up in the emergency room every year.

The app, which is free for college students and $7.99 per year for family members, also has features such the ability to quickly alert emergency contacts, GPS location tracking, a directory of local emergency services and the ability to save insurance information and a pre-signed medical consent form.

Schenbaum Lawton is a Hollywood producer and a member of a Reconstructionist congregation in Pacific Palisades, California.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.