Light in the Emergency Room : Dr. Debra Gershov West

When the sirens began on October 7, the team at Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital did what they had trained to do. They prepared for physical trauma. For bleeding. For broken bones. For the kind of injuries that follow explosions and gunfire.

What no one was prepared for was everything else.

Dr. Deborah Gershov-West was on duty that morning, arriving under heavy missile fire. Like every emergency physician in Israel, she knew the protocols for a mass casualty event. These events are intense but contained. A surge of patients. Hours of focused work. Then an end. This was not that.

Within minutes, it became clear that what was unfolding was not a temporary crisis but a war moving directly through the emergency room doors. Patients arrived with devastating injuries. Limbs torn away. Chests and abdomens shredded. Head and neck wounds that spoke not of random violence, but of sustained, deliberate attack. These were not injuries that stabilized quickly. And they did not stop coming. Hour after hour, day into night, the wounded kept arriving.

Inside the emergency department, something remarkable happened. Everyone functioned. Every patient was immediately treated. Clothes cut away. Wounds examined. Lives fought for. Care was delivered with precision and urgency, even as the background filled with screams and words no one should have to hear. People crying that their families had been murdered. That entire communities were gone. That they needed to return to the battlefield.

For Dr. Gershov-West, it all felt strangely distant. Not because it did not matter, but because it mattered too much. There was no room to collapse into emotion. A kind of protective bubble formed, allowing her and her colleagues to focus, to function, to keep going. Without it, the work could not have been done.

When she finally drove home days later, the question surfaced quietly but insistently. What comes next.

Running an emergency department in the middle of a war is already a matter of life and death. And yet, she understood something critical. In war, survival is often determined long before a patient reaches a hospital. In the first minutes. On the field. In the hands of whoever is there.

From that realization came the Frontline Emergency Medicine Program. A recognition that there was no longer a clear distinction between front lines and civilian spaces. Trauma happens in homes, in streets, in communities. Life-saving skills had to be placed not only in hospitals, but in the hands of soldiers, first responders, and everyday people.

Dr. Gershoff-West is careful with the word miracle. Too many lives were lost. Too much suffering remains. But she speaks openly about what she did witness. Strength. Courage. Heroism. Light.

She saw it in the way medical teams showed up without hesitation. In the way people stepped forward and asked how they could help. In the way she herself discovered resilience she did not know she possessed.

Two years later, the attacks have not stopped. The trauma has not ended. But neither has the bravery. Neither has the willingness to stand, to respond, to save lives in the midst of uncertainty.

Perhaps that is the miracle. Not the absence of darkness, but survival within it.

The lights of Chanukah are meant to shine outward. They exist to publicize miracles. Not only ancient ones, but the miracles of courage, faith, and survival in every generation. Sigal’s story is one of those lights. A reminder that even after profound darkness, the Jewish people endure. That God’s care continues. Then, now, and always.

As we reflect on the heroism and strength of Dr. Debra and the incredible staff at the hospital, let's not forget all of the defenders of Israel and the Jewish people and all those who give of themselves everyday to protect others. Their stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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