An interview with pediatric ophthalmologist Dr. Mike Bloom & educator Amy Bloom

By Marshall Weiss, The Observer

This summer, the Times of Israel reported that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, approximately 400 physicians and 30 health professionals from the United States and other countries have volunteered in Israel to treat those injured in the war or to cover for Israeli doctors and medical staff called to active duty. One of these physicians was pediatric ophthalmologist Dr. Mike Bloom of Kettering, July 1-15. He and his wife, Hillel Academy first- and second-grade secular teacher Amy Bloom, volunteered in and around Beersheba, the largest city in the Negev desert, in Israel’s south. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did your volunteering come about?
Mike: I found out from a pediatric ophthalmologist, a friend of ours, through Seroka Medical Center in Beersheba. It was geared toward specific needs. With the universal healthcare system there, sometimes the state hospitals get backlogs of surgeries or cases or specific situations. The ophthalmology department head reached out because he had a need, and it spread among all the Jewish pediatric ophthalmologists. We all forwarded it to our friends.

They ended up bringing in four of us, each on consecutive weeks, on two-week blocks. The last one, Retired U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. Robert Ezenauer, he was my mentor. He’s not Jewish. He was friends with an Israeli pediatric ophthalmologist, found out about it, and “wanted to do a mitzvah” is what he said.

Was it hard to get away?
Mike: We have our own practice. Rob (his brother, Dr. Rob Bloom) covered the office for me to go there. He goes frequently enough on his own for some time. We’ve been to Israel many times over the last decade. Amy went on a Momentum trip in January with her sister and Marci Vandersluis. When Amy came home, the first thing she said was, “Mike, we have to go back to Israel in the summer.” I’m not really good with a hammer or picking fruit. I was thinking, how do we do this? And then that email showed up in my inbox a month after she said we have to go back.

Amy: Momentum is an organization that was started by a handful of women. It was meant for women with younger children to go back to their communities after they’ve gone on the trip and spread the word to their friends and advocate for Israel. But after Oct. 7, they pivoted and made trips geared for anybody who wanted to go and bear witness.

Where did you and Mike stay in Beersheba?
Amy: We found an AirBNB in Beersheba’s Old City.

Mike, what procedures did you perform?
Mike: Their staffing was short either from reservist duty because of the war or other factors that played into a backlog in my area of expertise, which is strabismus surgery, which is crossed eyes and eye muscle surgeries. I was not taking care of the traumas. There was the ophthalmology team that would round on the soldiers. I made an effort during the first week of my stay to go round with that team. And it was very impactful.

You see in the news how many people die in a particular day, but you don’t always think of the ones that were injured. And the ones that are permanently going to have to deal with the injuries they sustain. The first patient I saw was probably in his young 20s and he was just a big, muscular kid. And he sustained such a bad brain injury, he was on a ventilator and permanent brain damage and will never be the same again. And then multiple blast injuries, foreign bodies in the eyes. One soldier had to have his eye removed from the trauma.

Have you done medical procedures in Israel before?
Mike: This was the first time. They assigned me to one of the residents, Mohammed Wattad, a second- to third-year resident, and he did all the translating, the charting. We would see patients together in the clinic, make the diagnosis, make the decisions on how to manage and treat them if they needed surgery. A lot of the patients were referred specifically by outside ophthalmologists and optometrists for the surgery. And then he would scrub in with me.

When I went there, I thought this is going to be just like the States and we’re going to do a lot of surgery and we’re going to take care of all the backlog of all the cases and see all these patients, but the Israeli healthcare system is different from ours. And so we definitely saw less patients and did less amount of cases than we would do here in my typical day. I kind of pivoted my mindset. A very rewarding part of the experience was the training of the residents. They got to scrub in, and we were able to help with their training and their experience. It was just a win-win.

When you weren’t volunteering, what were you up to?
Mike: We rented a car, and Amy was a champ with this microcar on the streets of Beersheba, which was pretty incredible. She would drop me off in the morning, at 7:30-8 at the hospital.

Amy: The chief ophthalmologist, who had arranged all of this in Beersheba, he and his wife live in a village near the West Bank. They have a school on-site and the school was having a summer camp. So he arranged for me to go there and I went for a few hours every day and tutored English. They were K through eighth grade. We’re going to try to do some kind of a communication between the Hillel kids and their kids where we write them in Hebrew, they write us in English.

When Mike would get off work, it was really, really hot. Usually, we’d rest in the afternoon for a couple hours and then go out after the sun was starting to set a little bit and go out to dinner. We spent a Shabbat in Jerusalem and that was great. We spent a Shabbat lunch at the chief ophthalmologist’s home. I went to Tel Aviv one day.

Mike: And Mohammed and another resident, Baker, he was Bedouin, he drove us in his souped-up SUV.

Amy: He took us to the sand dunes in the Negev. He gave us a whole Bedouin picnic after sundown.

Mike: Amy drove to Jerusalem for the day to visit the family (who lived in Dayton some years ago) whose 16-year-old son passed away (of natural causes). The Harels.

Amy: I saw them at the shiva.

Did you experience anything on the trip that you didn’t expect?
Mike: The resident assigned to me was Muslim, an Arab Israeli. And Baker, he’s really interested in pediatric ophthalmology. We were communicating about setting up future trips and getting him trained, as he has young children, and it would be difficult for him to be away from his family to come to the States and train.

I always knew that about 20 percent of the Israeli population was Arab. There’s Druze — it’s a melting pot. In Beersheba, in particular. When my resident would translate, English was probably the third language. There was Hebrew, Arabic, English, and there’s a lot of Russian immigrants there. We had a Ukrainian-Russian population there, too. What was heartwarming, what felt really nice was it felt exactly like seeing patients in my office here in Dayton. The staff is multicultural, the patients are multicultural. From the patients to the nurses to the doctors, everyone is just living their lives.

A lot of people have asked since I’ve come home, what was the political conversation? It was very little of that. It was all people trying to find a way to support their families, to better their lives, just like here. That was obvious from the get-go when we got there. It felt good. I was not expecting it to the extent that it was there.

A Muslim mom came into the hospital office, and she saw one of the Bring Them Home posters. She brought her daughter in for an eye exam. And she told the resident that she had one of those posters. She said, the resident translated back to me, that her brother was missing since Oct. 7th. And recently, security video had shown that he was killed and that his body had been taken. He had a job at one of the kibbutzes.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
Amy: The Israelis are so grateful to have visitors and volunteers. There are so many people walking around there to help, from a lot of farming, helping to pick crops, people helping put the kibbutzim back together, like Kibbutz Be’eri and Kfar Aza, and helping in general with anything they can. It’s just an incredible experience to be there and not just sitting over here, helpless. The Israelis really feel that and are grateful.

Mike: And the Israelis, they’re very in tune to the news in the media and how things are portrayed. They were just so thankful that an American Jew would come, or any American would come to Israel at this time. They were so appreciative. They feel isolated. To go there and not only bear witness but to show our support at this time felt wonderful to us. Throughout the entire trip it was, “Thanks for coming. We appreciate your just being here.”

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