Features
How did someone who “died” 20 different times survive?
“The Summer I Died Twenty Times”
Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN
In the summer of 2009 Winnipeg-born Fred Rutman claims to have “died” 20 times. As he writes in the prologue to his newly-released book, “The Summer I Died Twenty Times,” “I was clinically dead twenty times that we know of – heart stopped, no breathing, ready for the toe tag. And then I wasn’t.”
What happened to Fred Rutman, why it may have happened, and what he says he discovered has become the most effective treatment for his extremely rare condition is the subject of quite an intriguing 275-page account.
Fred had contacted me some time back to ask me whether I’d be interested in reading his book. Naturally, being the publisher of the Winnipeg Jewish newspaper, I was interested in knowing whether he had any Winnipeg relatives. It turns out Fred has strong Winnipeg roots, having been born here and having grown up here. Also, I remember being in school with his brother, Ray.
But, his book only deals tangentially with his Winnipeg connection. What Fred does is tell a story – a lengthy story that at times can bog you down with descriptions of what seem to be endless medical procedures he has undergone over the past 14 years, but one that is nonetheless thoroughly intriguing.
“The Summer I Died Twenty Times” is unusual also in how breezily it’s written. Chapters are short and are often given very humorous titles. Fred actually began writing the book during Covid as a means of passing time, he says. By the way, he also mentions that he’s had Covid three times – and, for someone who “died” 20 times before that, one has to wonder just what keeps this guy alive.
But, no matter what his medical history is – and how confounding it has been to what seem to have been a never-ending series of medical professionals, one is constantly left wondering: How did Fred Rutman survive?
Here’s how he describes his condition at one point: “I have a heart condition called a severe full AV block. Why, they don’t know. What they do know is it prevents your heart’s electrical signals from telling the atria and ventricle to beat in synch. That is to say, my heart stops. Now I am fully 100% dependent on a pacemaker to keep me alive…Collectively, my heart has stopped 50 plus times. Sometimes for extended periods of time. During many of these stoppages, I collapsed and bashed my head, resulting in concussion/brain damage…”
Fred also explains that at one point one of his doctors determined that Fred had suffered a stroke at birth, “which caused all sorts of brain trauma that no one caught.”
But, there is no conclusive evidence, he writes, that the stroke at birth is what has led to his heart problems.
No doubt, at this point, anyone reading this would be wondering: Was Fred Rutman clinically dead? The answer, as he discusses thoroughly, is an emphatic “yes.”
And then, of course, you would likely want to know: What was it like? Did he have an out-of-body experience at any time? Did he see a light? Did he go through a tunnel?
The answers, again, are: none of those things. Fred apologizes if a reader had been hoping to find some hint of an afterlife while reading his account.
Not that Fred Rutman is irreligious – far from it. He’s an observant Jew, not that he was always one, he explains. His becoming observant happened over time after he had moved to Toronto. In many ways, as he writes about the warm and loving Jewish community of which he’s now a part, he makes a convincing case for the merits of adhering to an Orthodox lifestyle.
In fact, because Fred does not refer to the many characters that populate his book by their real names, instead choosing to use often hilarious pseudonyms, it’s not always easy to remember just which member of his synagogue it was that administered to his needs at any particular point, including taking him to the hospital, visiting him there, bringing him kosher food to eat while he was there, or often letting him stay at their home, either while he was convalescing or after he had just experienced another near-death experience on the way to synagogue or on the way home.
I don’t know Fred Rutman, but after reading his story, I can’t help but think that someone who has as many friends as he does must be one terrific guy. He describes his academic and work background to some extent, but doesn’t really explain how he was able to support himself all the many times he ended up in hospital or later, while he was recovering.
Another aspect of the book, and perhaps one that will resonate with Manitoba readers in particular, is that no matter how often Fred’s condition may have been misdiagnosed and no matter how many times he may have been subjected to tortuous tests and procedures – he still received care within the Ontario health system.
One cannot help but wonder how long Fred Rutman would have survived had he still been living in Manitoba. Would he even have been able to see a doctor? you might wonder – and when you start to see the list of doctors who attended to Fred over the years, you might gain a fuller appreciation of our Canadian health care system, at least at it has developed in Ontario. In Manitoba, no doubt, he would have been put on a wait list and then subjected to numerous postponements of tests, procedures, and ultimately, life-saving operations,
At the same time though, the frustration that accompanies the numerous occasions during which doctors go over Fred’s medical history from the start, rather than just reading what other doctors have already determined is wrong, is just another example of how inefficient our Canadian medical system can be. (Since the book isn’t a scientific paper, it’s impossible to know whether Fred would have received better care within a different medical system, but his story certainly calls for a case study of that sort.)
Fred Rutman has had four pacemakers implanted underneath his chest wall over a relatively short number of years. Three had failed – something which, in itself, is especially disconcerting. The most recent one, which he has had now for three years does seem to be working properly, at least as of the current moment. But, when he describes being awake while surgeons thread leads into his heart to regulate its heartbeat – several times when he should have been asleep but the anesthetic was not given properly, well, it’s hard not to squirm as you’re reading that.
So, in the end, what has kept Fred Rutman alive? And, this is the part of the book that I’m sure will arouse the greatest controversy – it’s Fred’s categorical acceptance of Intermittent Fasting as a cure-all for a myriad of conditions he has experienced which he now says have either been eliminated of have been greatly relieved.
Without going into the details of Intermittent Fasting, which Fred does, suffice to say that it can be approached in a number of different ways. Here is how Wikipedia describes what Fred refers to simply as IF: “Intermittent fasting is any of various meal timing schedules that cycle between voluntary (or reduced calorie intake) and non-fasting over a given period. Methods of intermittent fasting include alternate-day fasting, periodic fasting, and daily time-restricted feeding.”
Upon further reading, however, I could find no conclusive scientific support to substantiate Fred’s claims for the wonderful effects of intermittent fasting. Perhaps, just as what exactly led to his experiencing so many heart stoppages still remains a mystery to the many doctors who treated Fred over the years, so too do the apparently wondrous effects that IF has had for him – and for many others who swear to its absolute usefulness.
“The Summer I Died Twenty Times” is hardly a medical treatise. Fred writes in a charmingly breezy manner. As I wrote to him an email though, there are a number of spelling and grammatical mistakes, but perhaps only a nit picker like me would notice them. In addition, Fred did admit to me that the first 40 pages of the book are a bit of a slog, as he describes the process that led to his writing the book.
By the time that you begin to read the details of what happened to Fred though, at first you’re bound to think: How did he even survive that very first episode in which his heart stopped, never mind the 19 others that followed? As you read on, however, reading about one episode after another where first Fred would have what he describes as a “brainquake”, followed by his blacking out totally when his heart stops, only to revive time and time again for mostly inexplicable reasons, it all seems to become a continuous cycle of events that may even seem monotonous.
But – what Fred Rutman experienced – and regardless how much stock he may put in Intermittent Fasting, may experience again, is absolutely riveting. He remains a medical mystery, although in time perhaps someone will come up with an explanation how someone who had “died” so many times was actually able to survive.
“The Summer I Died Twenty Times” is available on Amazon.
Features
A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
By Benyamin Cohen May 8, 2026 “This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.”
Benyamin has been reporting for more than a year on the improbable story of Nik Jakobs. Catch up here and here, and stay tuned for a forthcoming piece about a trip they took to the Netherlands to visit the towns where the Jakobs family survived the Holocaust. Yesterday was an important moment in Jakobs’ overall journey, and we wanted to share it with you.
STERLING, ILLINOIS — On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.
Around 75 people gathered on the edge of the field this week in Sterling, Illinois, a two-hour drive west of Chicago, where Jakobs and his family broke ground on a new home for Temple Sholom, the small congregation that has anchored Jewish life here for more than a century, and where his family has prayed since the 1950s.
The planned 4,000-square-foot building will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years. Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”
A 60-foot blue ribbon — chosen by Jakobs’ wife, Katie, to match the color of the Israeli flag — stretched across the future building site. His four daughters held it alongside his parents, brothers and friends. Then they lifted oversized gold scissors and cut the ribbon as pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches applauded.
The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past.
A nearby storage area holds Jewish objects Jakobs rescued from shuttered synagogues across the country: stained-glass windows, Torah arks, rabbi’s chairs, memorial plaques and wooden tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel. Many came from Temple B’nai Israel, a 113-year-old synagogue that closed down in 2025. It served generations of Jews in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, now a ghost town since the steel mills closed. Its remaining congregants donated sacred objects to Jakobs so their story could live on rather than disappear.
The day before the groundbreaking, the Jakobs family began opening some of the crates for the first time since they were packed away nearly a year ago. Nik’s father, Dave Jakobs, pried open one box with a hammer and crowbar while Nik loosened screws with an electric drill, the family gathered around like archaeologists opening a tomb.
Inside was a stained-glass window with images of a tallit and shofar bursting in jewel tones of blue, yellow and red. Jakobs’ mother, Margo, lifted Annie, the youngest of Nik’s daughters, so the 4-year-old could peer inside. The bright red glass matched the bow in her hair.
Nearby sat the massive wooden ark salvaged from Pennsylvania, topped with twin Lions of Judah whose carved paws once overlooked generations of worshippers.
Faith on the farmland
Temple Sholom — founded in 1910 — was once the center of Jewish life in Sterling, a town of 14,500 surrounded by flat farmland and tall grain silos. Its Jewish community once included a pharmacist, the manager of Kline’s department store and the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise.
Over time, membership dwindled. The roof sagged. The pews emptied.
Last year, the congregation sold its aging building and relocated High Holiday services to a tent on the Jakobs’ farm, where prayers mingled with the smell of manure and cattle lowing nearby.
At a moment when many small-town synagogues are closing, Temple Sholom is doing something increasingly rare: building a bigger new sanctuary from scratch. The synagogue will sit prominently along one of Sterling’s main roads — a highly visible expression of Jewish life in a region where Jews are few.
Thursday’s groundbreaking took place on the National Day of Prayer, the annual observance formalized under President Ronald Reagan, who grew up a few miles away in Dixon, Illinois. Earlier that morning, attendees gathered inside New Life Lutheran Church for a breakfast sponsored by Temple Sholom.
“I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”
Inside the church sanctuary, a large wooden cross glowed amber and blue above the dais while two giant screens displayed the National Day of Prayer logo. Jakobs, wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a powder-blue blazer, addressed the crowd.
“Tolerance is not weakness,” he said. “It is strength.”
The new synagogue will sit beside New Life Lutheran Church on land sold to Temple Sholom by farmer Dan Koster, 71, who has known the Jakobs family for three generations.
“We need more religious presence in the community,” Koster said.
For Drew Williams, New Life’s 38-year-old lead pastor, the synagogue and museum represent more than neighboring buildings. His church already hosts food-packing drives, summer meal programs and community events. He imagines future partnerships with Temple Sholom.
“I don’t think there’s any community that is immune to hate,” Williams said. “That just means it’s on us” to be on the other side “spreading peace.”
Sterling Mayor Diana Merdian, who is 41 and grew up in town with Jakobs, said the project reflects a broader desire among younger generations to preserve local history and identity. “If we don’t carry those stories, we lose them,” she said. “Once you lose that, you can’t get it back.”
During the ceremony in the cornfield, Temple Sholom’s longtime cantor, Lori Schwaber, asked those gathered to remember the congregation’s founding members and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish together. Jews and Christians stood side by side in the prairie wind as Hebrew prayers drifted across the open farmland.
Lester Weinstine, a 90-year-old congregant who was the first bar mitzvah at Temple Sholom when the shul was still housed out of a Pepsi bottling plant, looked out across the field in disbelief. “I never thought I would see this,” he said.
For Jakobs, the synagogue project has become inseparable from the lessons his grandparents’ survival taught him. “You sometimes feel on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But this community — that’s not what I’ve experienced here.”
If construction stays on schedule, the synagogue will open in fall 2027. Its first major service will not be a dedication ceremony, but the bat mitzvah of Jakobs’ oldest daughter, Taylor.
Members of the Pennsylvania congregation are planning a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion, after donating many of their sacred objects to help build Jakob’s synagogue. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.
“If a farmer can build a synagogue in a cornfield,” Jakobs said, “anybody can do it anywhere.”
Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
Ancient Torah Lessons Students Can Still Use Today In Class
Texts don’t survive through age alone; they survive because each generation finds something new and intriguing in them. One such text is the Torah. Students will find it useful in classes ranging from religion to philosophy, literature, or cultural studies, but many of its teachings aren’t confined to the past either. Stories from the Torah touch upon topics like stress, conflict, leadership, confusion, errors, accountability, and meaning. It sounds remarkably contemporary.
A student approaching the study of Torah has several options: religious text, historical source, literary piece, and a basis for philosophical contemplation. They all provide opportunities to explore the text in unique ways. The student writing on ancient texts or ethics can use EssayPro, the company employs experts, including Paul S., a full-time writer, who could assist the student with structuring their research. But great essays on ancient texts require more than just the approach of a museum curator.
The goal is not to shoehorn ancient narratives into a modern form or to look for an easy life hack in every single passage. Rather, students need to think about what made those stories stand the test of time. What did they observe about people? What did they try to warn against? And last but not least, what virtues did they celebrate? As soon as students start asking such questions, the Torah appears much closer.
Ancient Texts Teach Students To Be Patient Readers
Modern students are trained to read quickly. Just skim through the article. Scan all the comments. Read the summary and move forward. It does not quite work with the Torah, though. Many of the passages are rather short but rich in conflict, repetition, silence, and subtle details. Sometimes a person’s name, a long journey, an order given, or even a family squabble means more than expected.
For this reason, it is a great practice for students to deal with, as education is mostly geared toward finishing chapters faster, submitting assignments sooner, and hitting deadlines regularly. However, profound reflection requires patience, and the Torah is the perfect tool.
This type of reading goes past religious education alone. Students who learn to pace themselves with Torah can carry this approach into their literature, legal, historical, philosophical, and even scientific readings. Details are crucial. Contexts are crucial. Silence is equally crucial to speech.
Questions Do Not Denigrate One’s Faith Or Cognition
One of the best lessons for students from the Torah is that sincere people pose serious questions. The texts are full of debates, disagreements, doubts, tests, and misunderstandings. The addressees do not understand the demands placed on them. They argue, they bargain, and sometimes make mistakes.
It is necessary for the reason that many students view good studying as a process of getting clear and immediate responses to questions. It is usually not the case. Learning can start from frustration and confusion, since such a passage can serve better than an easy one.
During lessons, students should not fear questioning why a character did something like that, what their motivation was, what the possible consequences of their actions were, how it was perceived at that time, or how other cultures interpret the passage. Asking questions neither denigrates the subject nor learning itself.
Responsibility Is Greater Than Personal Success
In contemporary educational circles, the discourse of success often revolves around the personal gain that follows from achievement. Earn good grades. Construct your résumé. Land scholarships. Map out your future career path. On numerous occasions, the Torah asks a much larger question: what are our obligations to one another?
Themes associated with the concepts of justice, community, caring for the weak, honesty, and responsibility recur regularly throughout the work. These recurring motifs serve to undermine the narrow understanding of education and suggest that knowledge informs conduct.
To students, this message could be particularly relevant, as they face a daily opportunity to exercise their responsibility as members of the academic community. Education is more than a competitive pursuit, and the values that are promoted by the Torah can manifest themselves in group projects, class discussions, peer interactions, and other facets of college life.
Leaders Need Humility
Many students picture great leaders as people with big voices and confidence, who seem to have power from birth. Torah portrays leaders in a more complex way. They are hesitant, flawed, fearful, impatient, and highly human. Greatness is not portrayed as an absolute quality; rather, it is viewed as an ordeal.
This makes for some valuable insight for all those students who believe they lack “leader type” personalities. Leaders are not necessarily extroverts or people who get along easily with everyone else. Sometimes they speak up against injustice; at other times, they own up to their mistakes. Most of the time, they take responsibility even if it is hard.
This is also a useful perspective for all those people who lead student organizations and groups and manage projects for them. Being in charge doesn’t mean one can afford arrogance. A leader needs to know how to listen and learn, and leadership entails responsibility rather than power.
Memory Allows For Self-Understanding By Humans
There is a reason why the Torah speaks of memories time and again: remembering journeys, vows, commandments, failures, oppression, and liberation. This is not a form of nostalgia. Memories create identity. Memories tell people about their origin and things they cannot forget.
Students can take a lesson from it. In a world where everything keeps changing, memories may appear too slow or impractical. However, memories are useful to a student because they help one understand one’s place within a larger scheme of things. One learns about oneself through family history, national narrative, religious traditions, personal experience of migration, community experience, and culture.
It does not imply that students should blindly follow anything and everything handed down by others. Students should know where they stand and where they come from. Otherwise, they cannot make proper decisions in the present.
Features
Cricket in Israel: where it came from, why it’s barely visible, and who plays it today
Cricket made its way to Israeli soil back in the British Mandate period, and later got a boost from waves of immigration from India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Despite such a long history, it barely registers in the mainstream: it never found a place on TV, and the rules remain a mystery even to many sports journalists. Today, cricket grounds are used mostly by immigrants and a handful of local enthusiasts, for whom the game has become something far more than just a pastime.
The British trace and the first matches on Israeli soil
The history of cricket in the region goes back to the days when the British flag flew over Palestine. Officers and officials of the Mandate administration brought with them not only bureaucratic traditions, but also the habit of gathering on trimmed lawns with a bat and a red ball. For the local population, used to passionate football and fast-paced basketball, it looked utterly foreign: hours-long matches, strict white outfits, tea breaks.
The “exotic” sport was slow to take root. When the Mandate ended and the new state shifted to completely different priorities, cricket quietly slipped to the margins of the sports scene, surviving only in the memory of a few.
Waves of immigration that brought cricket back all over again
The game was given a second life by immigrants from countries where cricket was an everyday thing. People from India, South Africa, and England, as they settled in Israel, looked for familiar ways to spend their free time and quickly found one another. For them, a weekend match meant not so much sport as a way to unwind and speak their native language.
However, even within these communities, cricket never became a mass pastime. It remained an activity for a narrow circle, like home cooking—made for special occasions, not put on a restaurant menu.
Why cricket didn’t break into the Israeli mainstream
There are several reasons the game remains invisible, and each one on its own would already be enough:
- Competition with football, basketball, and extreme sports, which take viewers’ attention and sponsorship budgets.
- The near-total absence of cricket on TV and in major sports media.
- The complexity of the rules for newcomers: many Israelis still don’t see the difference between cricket and baseball.
- A cultural unfamiliarity with spending half a day on the field for a single match, watching tactical nuances from a blanket on the grass.
Taken together, this creates a situation where even the rare bits of cricket news slip past in people’s feeds unnoticed.
Who takes the field today
The core of the community is made up of students and IT specialists from India, engineers who arrived on work visas, and immigrants from South Africa and the United Kingdom. They’re joined by a small group of locals who discovered cricket while studying or traveling abroad.
For many of them, the ground turns into a space for cultural memory: Hindi and English can be heard, whole families come along, and children run around the field while their parents discuss the finer points of the last delivery. There are no roaring fan sections here, but everyone knows everyone, and the sense of belonging turns out to be stronger than in the stands at any stadium.
Where and how matches happen without a major league
A typical place to play: a park on the edge of town, a rented pitch, hand-marked lines. Organizers combine the roles of coaches, umpires, and commentators. Matches are put together on weekends, and the whole thing feels more like a club scene than a professional structure.
Everyday hassles have become part of the folklore: soccer players take over the field, the ball disappears into the bushes, someone among the key players can’t get away from work. Every attempt to organize a full match feels like tilting at windmills.
Cricket’s prospects: the barriers are stronger than the hype
You can count specialized fields across the country on one hand, government funding is minimal, and media attention goes to sports that are more spectacular and easier to understand.
Even so, things have started to move. Israel’s national team periodically plays in international tournaments, and every win becomes a small celebration for the community. Youth sections have begun to appear within communities—more like after-school clubs for now—and enthusiasts are experimenting with shorter formats to lower the barrier to entry for newcomers.
Does growth in betting activity point to cricket’s popularity?
An indirect indicator of interest in cricket in any country has long been activity in the online betting segment. Industry iGaming portals regularly publish regional statistics, and we reviewed data from several major bookmakers: 1xBet, PinUp, Melbet. On the website, in a review of the 1xBet cricket betting app, we learned that the number of downloads from Israel is still small, but a slight uptick is still being recorded. This matches the overall picture: the cricket community in the country is growing slowly but steadily, and the betting-platform figures only confirm a trend that enthusiasts can see on the ground, in person.
Cricket in Israel is unlikely to turn into a mass sport in the foreseeable future, but it continues to live on thanks to a resilient community of immigrants and local fans who keep the game going despite the circumstances and make it visible at least within its own small, if modest, world.