Two Babies, Two Resuscitations, One Extraordinary Reunion
When twins Chaim Yosef David and Mordechai Eliyahu were born at home in Nahariya, neither had a pulse and neither was breathing. An MDA dispatcher guided their father through CPR as a Mobile Intensive Care Unit raced towards the family. Minutes later, MDA paramedics found themselves fighting for two newborn lives at once. One year later, the family reunited with the paramedic who helped save them.
The first baby was born without a pulse and wasn’t breathing.
Inside their home in Nahariya, Esther and Idan suddenly found themselves facing every parent’s worst nightmare. Idan called Magen David Adom, and an EMT working as a dispatcher at MDA’s National Emergency Dispatch Center immediately began guiding him through CPR on his newborn son while a Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU) raced toward the family.
MDA Paramedic Sahar Barel and his team arrived and immediately took over the resuscitation.
Then the second baby was born. He, too, was unresponsive, without a pulse and not breathing.
The MDA team now had two newborns requiring immediate resuscitation. Working simultaneously, Barel and his team performed CPR on both babies, providing lifesaving treatment as they fought to restore their heartbeats and breathing.
Their efforts succeeded. Two tiny hearts began beating again.
The twins were evacuated for further treatment, beginning what would become a long journey for the family. Eventually, the babies, now named Chaim Yosef David and Mordechai Eliyahu, were able to leave the hospital and go home. A year later, the two boys are thriving.
Recently, Esther and Idan reunited with Barel, this time under circumstances no one could have imagined during those critical moments in their Nahariya home. Instead of two newborns requiring resuscitation, he met two healthy little boys surrounded by their family. “Thanks to you, they’re here with us,” Esther and Idan told him. “There are no words to say thank you.”
For Barel, the reunion carried an especially personal significance. "Seeing them healthy today means everything to me,” he told the family. “As both a father and a twin myself, this story is deeply personal. Days like this remind me why we do what we do.”
The reunion brought together two very different moments in the twins’ lives: the night they required lifesaving treatment and the moment, one year later, their family could finally introduce them to one of the people who fought to give them that future.
For Esther and Idan, the memory of that night will always be part of their family’s story.
But today, Chaim Yosef David and Mordechai Eliyahu have another story to tell, one measured not in CPR cycles or heartbeats, but in a year of growing, going home and simply being together.
