Within a few days of the terror attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, the memorial site in front of Bondi Pavilion was filled with handwritten notes, candles, toys and hundreds of thousands of flowers. Typically at such spontaneous memorials, accumulated items are eventually removed and discarded, but Sydney Jewish Museum senior curator Shannon Biderman and Australian Jewish artist Nina Sanadze made a quick decision to honor the victims by giving the flowers new life, even as their petals began to wilt.

They rented warehouse space and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to collect, dry and sort petals, stems and seeds, and identify all the plant species. The flowers will eventually be the basis of a permanent installation in the museum—an exhibit designed to forge pain into memory.

The museum project is a long-term means of using art to honor the victims and also comfort survivors and the broader community. And I am both comforted and proud that in the immediate aftermath of the attack—within an hour, in fact—the Hadassah Medical Organization reached out in the best way it could. Australia, of course, has world-class medical professionals, but no country has more experience dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of terror than Israel, and the most positive thing the nation’s healers can do with such painful expertise it is to share it.

HMO experts in psychology and trauma care were in contact with the Forum of Jewish Therapists in Australia and held an emergency webinar on Zoom, led by Dr. Amichai Ben Ari, a rehabilitation psychologist specializing in acute trauma. The webinar focused on guiding therapists on how to intervene with victims and their families during the initial crisis intervention phase as well as how to support second-tier victims and the wider community. During the meeting, a needs assessment was conducted along with an initial analysis of steps required in the early stages of response. Dr. Ben Ari later shared comprehensive guidelines for community therapists, focused on early intervention and identification of individuals requiring acute emotional care as well as recommendations tailored for community members.

This ability to respond so quickly—bridging the almost 9,000-mile distance between Jerusalem and Sydney—was built on a network of communication developed over years between Israel and Australian Jewish community leaders, and between HMO, Hadassah Australia and Hadassah in the United States.

The relationship is rooted in shared purpose—and it is mutually beneficial. The Gandel Foundation, based in Melbourne, is the principal donor behind the Gandel Rehabilitation Center on the Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus campus. The center opened in January 2024 and has been critical in Hadassah’s work—and Israel’s—in treating and healing civilian and military victims of the Gaza war. Shocked and saddened as we are by the deadly attack in Sydney, it is consoling to know that the relationship between Israel and the world’s ninth largest Jewish community is on solid ground, and that it is cemented by the dedicated medical staff, members and donors of Hadassah.

Building relationships is vital to Hadassah’s mission of rebuilding bodies damaged by illness or injury. And we were excited recently when two surgical teams at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem performed one of the rarest feats in medicine: Back-to-back cardiac bypass and liver transplant surgeries on a single patient in a single night. Dr. Abed Khaleilah, director of HMO’s Solid Organ Transplant Unit, said that the patient—44-year-old Shneor Kipgan—”would not have survived without the liver transplant [and] would not have been able to undergo the liver transplant if it were not for the complex bypass surgery.” The double procedure had previously been performed only at a few leading world hospitals and was unprecedented in Israel.

We live in a world of life and death, and we tip the balance in favor of the former through love and action, through imagination and memory. The myriad tools at our disposal are ancient and futuristic. With plants and transplants—among many other resources—we heal body and spirit.