Ebola-Stricken Cameraman With Jewish Roots Arrives in U.S.
An Ebola-stricken NBC photographer with Jewish roots has arrived in the U.S. for treatment.
A private plane carrying Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman for who contracted Ebola in Liberia, landed in Omaha en route to the Nebraska Medical Center, NBC reported. The plane was met by an ambulance manned by worked in yellow protective suits, NBC video showed.
Mukpo was raised in Colorado by Tibetan Buddhist leader Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; his mother was one of his several wives. His biological father, Mitchell Levy, one of Trungpa’s followers, is Jewish, the Associated Press reported. Mukpo’s mother and Levy married after Trungpa’s death.
Mukpo was expected to arrive at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha on Monday.
As an infant, he was identified as a reincarnated Tibetan lama, a role he did not embrace though he is still a practicing Buddhist.
Mukpo has worked at Human Rights Watch and spent two years in Liberia working as a researcher for the non-profit Sustainable Development Institute, to help workers in mining camps outside Monrovia.
Mukpo, who visited Providence in May, returned to Liberia in August to cover the epidemic. Levy told the AP that his son was filming inside and around clinics and high-risk areas but didn’t know how he got infected.
With JTA
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