Imagine, say, that it’s Friday night and you start feeling chest pain. Most non-Jews wouldn’t think twice about it; they’d just pick up the phone and dial 911. But the calculation’s not so simple for Orthodox Jews because Friday night is the Sabbath, and they’re not supposed to use electricity.

“We have obviously a lot of doctors in the community, and I remember one of the doctors told me a story where somebody literally walked over to his house, I don’t remember, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, literally in pain, cardiac pain,” recounted Rivka Kompel, one of Hatzalah Chicago’s board members. “[He] thought he was possibly having a heart attack, and he still walked to the person’s house 20 or 30 minutes because it was the Sabbath.”

In Hebrew, Hatzalah means “rescue.” Hatzalah Chicago is a non-profit organization funded through private donations and staffed by unpaid volunteers. Kompel says the mission is to prevent more stories like the example she gave. Kompel says Jewish law allows people to break the Sabbath in life-or-death situations, but problems arise because, sometimes, people can’t tell the difference between what’s serious and what’s not.

Hatzalah’s emergency medical technicians are trained in both medicine and religious law. Kompel hopes they’ll help people make smarter decisions when it comes to the intersection of religious law and medical urgency.

Simcha Frank has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting to get Hatzalah off the ground. The team’s dispatch center is just a small, windowless room in a Skokie office park. But while the group has been setting up, they’ve used the room for equipment storage. The day he showed the facillty to me, the phone rang.

“That’s weird,” Frank said, after hanging up. “So there’s this organization nationwide that keeps track of all the Hatzalahs. They wanted to see if we’re operational.”

Lots of other cities have Hatzalahs. Frank, a Jewish funeral home director, says his baby nephew was saved by Hatzalah Brooklyn. He got advice from Hatzalah Baltimore.

Here’s how the service will work: If someone in the service area experiences a medical emergency, they still need to call 911. But Frank hopes they’ll also call another number for Hatzalah. Hatzalah’s dispatch center will radio its 40-or-so EMTs.

Each EMT has gone through standard training at Malcolm X College or Vista Health Systems, a hospital in Waukegan, Ill. They carry emergency medical equipment in their cars at all times — things like oxygen tanks, defibrillators, and first aid supplies. That helps them stabilize a patient in the first minutes after a call’s put out.

But once the fire department or an ambulance comes on scene, Hatzalah backs off. That’s part of Frank’s agreements with Chicago, Skokie and Lincolnwood.

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