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For war-related rehab, leading Israeli hospital uses innovative simulation system and unique tools

Even before the smoke began to clear from Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack, Israeli healthcare professionals realized they were facing a series of unprecedented challenges.
Not only would wounded civilians and soldiers require treatment, but the entire nation was traumatized, including caregivers.
“By the afternoon of October 7, we knew this was a huge event that nobody had ever encountered in Israel,” said Prof. Amitai Ziv, a former combat pilot and director of the Integrated Rehabilitation Hospital at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv. “We immediately realized we will have two major challenges, each one a tsunami. One is the number of patients that require rehabilitation, and two, the largest numbers ever of people suffering from acute stress disorder, which might lead to PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Ziv, a physician, is also the founder and director of MSR – the Israel National Center for Medical Simulation at Sheba. The center enables healthcare providers like doctors and nurses to practice challenging clinical procedures and encounters in a simulated environment using tools such as robotics, surgical simulators and even role-playing actors so that real patients are not put in any danger. Since its establishment, over 300,000 healthcare professionals have been trained and certified by MSR.
In the days immediately following Oct 7, MSR switched to focus on new wartime needs. The center transported high-tech, full-body mannequin simulators to train army medical teams serving in both major conflict zones — in the Gaza area and along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon — to improve their trauma management skills and prepare them for the lifesaving scenarios they were about to encounter in the battlefield. The center also used actors for “high-touch” simulations of interactions with people experiencing trauma to help prepare psychosocial teams to manage stress-related issues.
The hostage issue presented the most difficult challenge.
Even if the hostages’ release could be secured, how could they be reintegrated into Israeli life under such extreme circumstances — with relatives still being held by Hamas, family members murdered, their homes destroyed, entire communities displaced and the nation in the midst of an intense war with mounting casualties?
Ziv launched a series of intensive training courses involving simulations to prepare Sheba physicians, psychologists, and social workers, as well as Israel Defense Forces psychosocial professionals, to receive the hostages and accompany them during the early hours and days after their return from captivity. Out of the over 100 captives that were released in November, 30 went to Sheba.
Treating the hostages is just part of Ziv’s war-related work at Sheba, Israel’s largest hospital. As soon as the war started, Ziv began moving around entire departments and retraining staff to add capacity in the rehab hospital, which consists of three divisions: physical, mental and geriatric rehabilitation. Quick renovations added 122 new rehab beds to the 140 existing beds.
“We made a decision that we would not say no to any patient who needs to be here, war- as well as non-war-related, and we do not push anyone out,” Ziv said. “We pushed ourselves to accommodate all evolving patient needs.”
Sheba has received more war-related rehab patients than any other hospital in the country. Most are recovering from complex injuries involving abdominal, surgical, and orthopedic injuries, amputations, or neurologic, spinal, or head injuries. Pain management and mental support are major priorities.
“PTSD is going to be the main, long-lasting condition requiring treatment,” Ziv said. He estimated that the numbers will be in the thousands and warned that even before the war, Israel had a 40% national staffing shortage of mental health professionals.
Yotam Polizer, IsraAID’s CEO, at a field school that the relief organization set up in the southern Israeli city of Eilat to serve Israeli families displaced by the Oct. 7 war. (Yehuda Ben-Itah/IsraAID)
Patients, most of whom spend two to three months in rehab, have access to an array of therapies at Sheba, including physical, occupational, and hydro therapies, as well as complementary therapies such as art, yoga, and even animal-assisted therapy using Sheba’s four trained dogs.
“It doesn’t feel like a hospital,” said Avishai Shoshani, 49, a combat soldier at Sheba injured in both legs during combat in Gaza. “Here you feel like you’re with a bunch of friends. And this is a very important aspect of rehab.”
Unlike most other rehab facilities in Israel, Sheba’s integrated rehabilitation hospital is part of the larger medical center, giving rehab patients full access to the acute care hospital where many of them have been treated initially. The integration helps ensure continuity of care for patients who need surgery and other medical treatments during the rehabilitation process.
The war also brought an unprecedented partnership between Sheba and IsraAID, the Israeli disaster relief organization that provides emergency medical response, post-trauma mental health support, and humanitarian relief after disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, and wars. IsraAid and Sheba had collaborated in the past on global disasters, but they never before had to work together in Israel.
Both Ziv, 65, and IsraAID CEO Yotam Polizer, 40, are members of a unique group: They are laureates of The Charles Bronfman Prize, an annual $100,000 award given to a Jewish humanitarian under age 50 whose work benefits humankind and is grounded in Jewish values.
The Prize was established in 2004 by the children of Canadian philanthropist Charles Bronfman — Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman together with their spouses Andrew Hauptman and Claudia Blondin Bronfman — to honor their father’s values and philanthropic work.
Ziv received the Prize in 2007 and is now one of the judges on the prize committee; Polizer won the award last year. As part of the prize fellowship, laureates get to know one another and sometimes end up collaborating. IsraAID recently facilitated a partnership with the State of California to donate a field hospital to Sheba.
While IsraAID has worked in many countries, including post-tsunami Japan and post-earthquake Haiti, the current war in Israel is unlike any other disaster it has dealt with because it’s happening at home, Polizer said.
“This is a new challenge for us to give professional humanitarian support while we are at the same time part of the community that is affected,” Polizer said. “Being able to do something, even if it is small, also helps our team from a mental-health perspective. My coping mechanism is doing something and getting into action.”
Soon after Oct. 7, IsraAID began working with displaced Israeli families who had been relocated to hotels from their homes in Israeli communities in the conflict zone.
Ziv, too, is touched personally by the war, as is practically every Israeli. He has two sons who serve in the army reserves, one a surgeon in the medical corps in Gaza. His staffers also have family in the army or friends injured or killed or displaced.
“This is a long journey. We will be dealing with the outcomes of the war for years to come,” Ziv said. “Yet I trust the solidarity and courageous spirit of the Israeli people. These unique, exceptional qualities are of utmost significance for successful rehabilitation — and for resiliency, strength and cohesion of Israeli society.”
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The post For war-related rehab, leading Israeli hospital uses innovative simulation system and unique tools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote

Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’

Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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