I would love a post from someone involved with Hatzolah to clarify the situation because we have to deal with them occasionally here too.
A quick background, from someone who has watched Hatzolah from the background in several different settings. Again, please correct me if you find I am wrong. Hatzolah is an all volunteer ambulance service that is tasked with serving Orthodox Jewish communities. They have "chapters" all over NJ, NY, CA, Waterbury, CT, and Baltimore, MD, as well as Canada, Mexico, England, Israel, South Africa, Russia, Australia, etc.
H exists as a "third-service" soliciting only emergency calls using a private dispatch number from members of the community and dispatching members from wherever they are. In principal, H can call in "mutual aid", that is the ambulance service naturally set up to cover the area, but as I understand it, they do very infrequently.
Hatzolah claims that because of their volunteer-in-the-community model, they have excellent response times (they do!), and provide a higher (and more respectful) level of care to the orthodox Jews then would be provided elsewhere. During the week, they operate just like any other ambulance service, but their operations change on Shabbat (Friday night to Saturday night). On the Sabbath, Observant Jews are prohibited from performing any work, defined as lighting a fire (or using electricity, or driving for that matter), writing, carrying items from one domain to another, etc, except in the case of needing to save a life.
Through enormously complicated discussions (that I simply don’t understand), each community has come to its own consensus about how things are done. In some communities, members can drive the ambulance TO the call (expecting to save a life), but then when they realize it isn’t threatening need to call in a non-Jew to drive to the hosp, others, the members will drive the ambulance to the hospital patient loaded, but then cannot drive the ambulance back to base or restock (because life is not at stake any more).
Nevertheless, Jews are never a group to keep things simple or easy, and in many communities clash with local authorities often. There were a set of articles in the newspaper about a year ago about a Hatzolah chapter in NJ who was issued $1500 in parking tickets by the LEOs in a 2-week period, for parking their ambulance around the corner from their station (I don’t want to get into the details…). If the chapters call for mutual aid, there are often disagreements between crews, although I hope patient care is never compromised.
In Israel, Hatzolah exists slightly differently. MDA (Magen David Adom) provides all the ambulance service (First Response, transport, etc.), but in areas of high concentrations of Orthodox, Hatzolah supplements them. All Hatzolah members are trained, certified, monitored, etc. by MDA, and supplement them on scenes, either by arriving before the ambulance, augmenting MCI crews, or driving when both “techs” need to be in the back. Hatzolah supplies QRS motorcycles, supplies, equipment, etc to the communities to facilitate the quick response. In fact, some EMT/drivers for MDA are “on call” for Hatzolah when not at work, take an ambulance home with them at night, and take it to calls as a QRS before the on-call unit can get there (as well, to decrease the response time if there were to be an MCI). It’s a neat little system, but for the record, not without internal politics and strife.
Hatzolah is generally looked at as a positive force in the EMS world. Non-Jewish ambulance services don’t need to get involved in these tight knit communities, don’t have to deal with the politics, etc. and the communities can usually fend for themselves. When called, Hatzolah ambulances do respond outside their service area (mutual aid), do provide quality patient care, and as I understand it, several Hatzolah chapters sent crews to WTC on 9/11/01.
Sorry for the long post, please correct me if you find anything incorrect, and shoot me a PM if you have any questions.
