Meet Moti Kahana, the Israeli Saving Syrian Lives
Moti Kahana Image by YouTube
By Naomi Zeveloff December 21, 2016
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel is looking into ways to bring in wounded Syrian civilians, especially those from Aleppo, for treatment Israeli hospitals.
It’s an effort that is already underway in Israel, a country that is technically at war with Syria, in part thanks to the work of Moti Kahana.
Kahana, an Israeli-American businessman who started several companies in the automotive field, is the president of Amaliah, an American organization that brings Syrians to Israeli clinics and hospitals for treatment.
Image by Getty Images
According to an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Kahana’s humanitarian work was inspired by a trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. It was there that he learned that the Jews of Iaşi, the Romanian town where his family originated, were killed by local government forces, not the Nazis in 1941.
“The government of Romania was shooting its own people — that really got me very emotional,” he told the Jewish Chronicle.
He saw the same thing happening in the Middle East, and felt galvanized to help.
Amaliah’s work is coordinated in part by an Israel Defense Forces unit that helps Syrians travel from villages in southern Syria into the Golan Heights, the Syrian territory that Israel annexed in 1981, Haaretz reported.
One hospital in Tsfat, the northern Israeli city, has treated 2,500 Syrians since 2013, although its unclear how many of them were brought there by Amaliah or by the Israeli government.
Syrians reach Israel in Amaliah’s large purple bus and then receive medical treatment and aid packages with formula and medicine before being transported back to their villages.
Kahana has also focused on aiding Syria’s Jewish population. In 2014, he helped the last Jewish family in Aleppo to escape to Israel.
Amaliah has been lobbying the Israeli government to coordinate with Syrian officials to create a safe zone in southern Syria, which would allow Israeli humanitarian aid to enter through the Quneitra crossing, which is facilitated by a United Nations force since 1974.
The fact that Kahana is helping the population of a country hostile to his own is not lost on him.
“If we don’t care for them, don’t expect one day if something happens to us, somebody will care for us,” he said in a recent fundraising video for Amaliah.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
