The man accused in the brutal killings of 11 people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh was taken to the hospital after he was apprehended to be treated for the injuries he suffered in a gunfight with the police.
In the emergency room when he arrived, Robert Bowers was shouting, “I want to kill all the Jews,” according to the hospital’s president.
If he only knew then about the identity of the team tasked with keeping him alive: at least three of the doctors and nurses who cared for him at the Allegheny General Hospital were Jewish, according to president Jeffrey K. Cohen.
“We’re here to take care of sick people,” Cohen, who is a member of the Tree of Life congregation where the massacre happened, said in a television interview. “We’re not here to judge you. We’re not here to ask ‘Do you have insurance?’ or ‘Do you not have insurance?’ We’re here to take care of people that need our help.”
Cohen’s simple and unapologetic description of how Bowers came to be treated fairly and impartially by the very people he had supposedly hated has traveled quickly around the world.
Perhaps it is a stark reminder that there is something more powerful than caring only for one’s own. Perhaps it was Cohen’s radical demonstration of humanity in an era increasingly marked by naked partisanship and tribalism. Either way the story has resonated; Cohen has been interviewed by CNN, Britain’s Channel 4 News, ABC and others.
Read the article in The Sydney Morning Herald.