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90 Seconds: The Epic Story of Eli Beer and United Hatzalah
An Israeli child is born in a Ukrainian bomb shelter -- and United Hatzalah brings her home under fire ...
A United Hatzalah volunteer scales a 12-foot-wall – and is the first to respond to the tragedy of Meron ...
Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, slips and breaks his leg racing to an emergency -- and manages to crawl to the choking child and save her life ...
The amazing work of Israel’s United Hatzalah began, incredibly, when five-year-old Eli Beer witnessed a terror attack and dreamed of being the one to save the victim. While still a young teen, Eli set out to make that dream come true, creating an underground network of pioneering EMTs who were determined to bring their life-saving skills to victims in only 90 seconds, no matter where they were.
90 Seconds is the story of how a boy who failed in school created one of the world’s largest all-volunteer emergency service. It’s the story of dramatic rescues, sometimes under fire. Of life-changing and life-saving innovations such as the “ambucycle.” Of bringing United Hatzalah’s lifesaving experience to Nepal, Haiti, and, most recently, Ukraine, and their heart-rending rescue work in the Surfside and Versailles wedding hall tragedies.
It is the story of how with determination, vision, self-sacrifice and compassion -- and, of course, siyata D’Shmaya (the help of Heaven) -- lives can be saved and dreams can come true.
A United Hatzalah volunteer scales a 12-foot-wall – and is the first to respond to the tragedy of Meron ...
Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah, slips and breaks his leg racing to an emergency -- and manages to crawl to the choking child and save her life ...
The amazing work of Israel’s United Hatzalah began, incredibly, when five-year-old Eli Beer witnessed a terror attack and dreamed of being the one to save the victim. While still a young teen, Eli set out to make that dream come true, creating an underground network of pioneering EMTs who were determined to bring their life-saving skills to victims in only 90 seconds, no matter where they were.
90 Seconds is the story of how a boy who failed in school created one of the world’s largest all-volunteer emergency service. It’s the story of dramatic rescues, sometimes under fire. Of life-changing and life-saving innovations such as the “ambucycle.” Of bringing United Hatzalah’s lifesaving experience to Nepal, Haiti, and, most recently, Ukraine, and their heart-rending rescue work in the Surfside and Versailles wedding hall tragedies.
It is the story of how with determination, vision, self-sacrifice and compassion -- and, of course, siyata D’Shmaya (the help of Heaven) -- lives can be saved and dreams can come true.
499 pages, Hardcover
Published March 16, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 13, 2023
At a visit to Aish HaTorah for a bris, Rav Elazar Shach saw the incredible work that Rabbi Noach Weinberg had done. Rav Shach said that if one man can destroy six million lives, then one man can save six million lives. He was clearly aroused to express this idea by the remarkable feats that Rav Weinberg had already performed. Hitler was not a particularly talented or intelligent person, and yet he was able to do so much harm. Therefore, each of us, no matter how ordinary we consider ourselves, has the potential to do more good than the evil that he perpetrated.
As an organization, it's just a matter of time until United Hatzalah of Israel will have saved six million lives. Eli Beer is the founder of United Hatzalah, and his extraordinary story is told in 90 Seconds: The Epic Story of Eli Beer and United Hatzalah (Shaar Press) by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer.
United Hatzalah is a Jerusalem-based volunteer-based emergency medical services (EMS) organization. Its mission is to provide immediate medical intervention during the critical window between the onset of an emergency and the arrival of traditional ambulance assistance.
Founded in 2006, it has become the largest independent, non-profit, fully volunteer EMS organization in the world, with over 6,200 volunteer medical first responders nationwide and additional chapters in Panama, United States, and Ukraine. But the most fantastic fact about United Hatzalah is that they have an astounding average response time of less than 3 minutes nationwide and 90 seconds in metropolitan areas.
In this most engaging book, Seltzer details Beer's story from a young yeshiva student in Jerusalem who witnessed a bus bombing, to the founder of one of the most effective EMS organizations in the world.
The book is an honest and revealing account of Beer's life. With all of the success (and lives saved) that Beer achieved, his trajectory in life was never one of certainty. The book details an underlying tension that Beer had to face growing up. Rav Asher Weiss observed that Israel's Charedi society lacks a working class that thrives in the United States. In the United States, one can be a charedi and a partner in a law firm, hospital chief of staff, and the like. That reality doesn't exist in Israel.
For Beer, who would never succeed in a traditional charedi trajectory, the fact that he hadn't succeeded in yeshiva learning like his three brothers only exacerbated things. Seeing himself as the black sheep of the family, he could have easily fallen into the abyss of the many Charedi kids who leave observance due to not fitting into the very narrow system, and not finding a place for themselves.
This is a unique book where Seltzer writes of Beer's many successes and failures. One particular failure was when he asked a very generous donor to increase his already significant donation. The donor felt that Beer had seriously overstepped things and told him never to contact him again.
Beer saw that what he did was wrong on every level, and there was no way to justify his irrational exuberance in pursuing a donation. He wrote an apology to the donor, a brutally honest mea culpa. The donor forgave him because Beer was in it for United Hatzalah only.
I was in Jerusalem in March and got a tour of the United Hatzalah office and command center. It's a remarkable facility. It has a world-class operation with a state of the art technology and notification systems that rival command centers of large metropolitan cities.
Eli Beer's story is not that of one born into greatness or deep familial connections. His story is that of a man with laser focus, commitment, and sheer will. And with those qualities, how they can achieve the impossible. And it's one of the most inspiring stories you can ever read.
As an organization, it's just a matter of time until United Hatzalah of Israel will have saved six million lives. Eli Beer is the founder of United Hatzalah, and his extraordinary story is told in 90 Seconds: The Epic Story of Eli Beer and United Hatzalah (Shaar Press) by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer.
United Hatzalah is a Jerusalem-based volunteer-based emergency medical services (EMS) organization. Its mission is to provide immediate medical intervention during the critical window between the onset of an emergency and the arrival of traditional ambulance assistance.
Founded in 2006, it has become the largest independent, non-profit, fully volunteer EMS organization in the world, with over 6,200 volunteer medical first responders nationwide and additional chapters in Panama, United States, and Ukraine. But the most fantastic fact about United Hatzalah is that they have an astounding average response time of less than 3 minutes nationwide and 90 seconds in metropolitan areas.
In this most engaging book, Seltzer details Beer's story from a young yeshiva student in Jerusalem who witnessed a bus bombing, to the founder of one of the most effective EMS organizations in the world.
The book is an honest and revealing account of Beer's life. With all of the success (and lives saved) that Beer achieved, his trajectory in life was never one of certainty. The book details an underlying tension that Beer had to face growing up. Rav Asher Weiss observed that Israel's Charedi society lacks a working class that thrives in the United States. In the United States, one can be a charedi and a partner in a law firm, hospital chief of staff, and the like. That reality doesn't exist in Israel.
For Beer, who would never succeed in a traditional charedi trajectory, the fact that he hadn't succeeded in yeshiva learning like his three brothers only exacerbated things. Seeing himself as the black sheep of the family, he could have easily fallen into the abyss of the many Charedi kids who leave observance due to not fitting into the very narrow system, and not finding a place for themselves.
This is a unique book where Seltzer writes of Beer's many successes and failures. One particular failure was when he asked a very generous donor to increase his already significant donation. The donor felt that Beer had seriously overstepped things and told him never to contact him again.
Beer saw that what he did was wrong on every level, and there was no way to justify his irrational exuberance in pursuing a donation. He wrote an apology to the donor, a brutally honest mea culpa. The donor forgave him because Beer was in it for United Hatzalah only.
I was in Jerusalem in March and got a tour of the United Hatzalah office and command center. It's a remarkable facility. It has a world-class operation with a state of the art technology and notification systems that rival command centers of large metropolitan cities.
Eli Beer's story is not that of one born into greatness or deep familial connections. His story is that of a man with laser focus, commitment, and sheer will. And with those qualities, how they can achieve the impossible. And it's one of the most inspiring stories you can ever read.
August 10, 2023
90 Seconds: The Epic Story of Eli Beer and United Hatzalah (Shaar Press, 2023), by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer
Reviewed by Shira Yael Klein (Rachack Review)
The beginning of the book started off by vividly depicting Eli Beer as a little kid traumatized from seeing a bus bombing and not knowing how to help. He was bright and entrepreneurial, successfully running all kinds of side hustles (dalet minim, bus trips for families, and even a gogo bank), but he could never make it in school. His whole family is very Haredi, and all his brothers were very successful on that track. But this kid Eli was just different. You can even see it in the pictures: Eli is a blue shirt, leather kippah type of a guy, and the rest of his family is in classic Haredi black and white.
The trauma of the bus bombing that Eli witnessed at the age of five, compounded by the repeated tragedy of people who could have been saved dying before the ambulance got there that he saw time and again as a young MADA volunteer, filled him with a burning passion: Something must be done to save more people, to save people better, and to save people faster.
And Eli did it. At its inception, Hatzolah was an underground organization. They used a radio that Eli bought at Radio Shack and smuggled into Israel to hack into MADA’s internal broadcasts. The minute they knew where there was an emergency, the nearest teenaged-volunteer would run over and start doing CPR, keeping the guy alive until the MADA ambulance got there. It was a bare bones operation, but it worked.
One day, a teenaged Eli Beer was manning the radio (instead of helping his father in his sefarim store), when he hears that there’s been a car accident right next to him. He races out to the street and sees a man lying there, bleeding profusely from a torn artery in his neck. Eli whips his kippah off his head, shoves it into the hole in the guy’s neck, and saves his life.
That was a good story. I would’ve loved more stories like that.
Teenage Eli, saving people with his band of undercover superheroes, grows up to be Eli Beer, the head of Ichud Hatzlolah. Hatzolah has come a long way from its humble origins. It is now a household name, and a major, organized force in saving lives. Nowadays, Hatzolah volunteers have defibrillators. And ambucycles. All of this takes money. Lots and lots of money.
At some point, the book shifts into showing how Eli becomes an incredible fundraiser. I would have been interested in reading more heartwarming stories about the work that Hatzolah volunteers do day in and day out, and less about Eli Beer’s flights all over the world, hobnobbing with the upper crust and getting million-dollar donations. This is truly a praiseworthy and wonderful thing, but as a reader it got kind of boring. Ultimately, I read the book and I even enjoyed it. But I was really hoping for more.
Reviewed by Shira Yael Klein (Rachack Review)
The beginning of the book started off by vividly depicting Eli Beer as a little kid traumatized from seeing a bus bombing and not knowing how to help. He was bright and entrepreneurial, successfully running all kinds of side hustles (dalet minim, bus trips for families, and even a gogo bank), but he could never make it in school. His whole family is very Haredi, and all his brothers were very successful on that track. But this kid Eli was just different. You can even see it in the pictures: Eli is a blue shirt, leather kippah type of a guy, and the rest of his family is in classic Haredi black and white.
The trauma of the bus bombing that Eli witnessed at the age of five, compounded by the repeated tragedy of people who could have been saved dying before the ambulance got there that he saw time and again as a young MADA volunteer, filled him with a burning passion: Something must be done to save more people, to save people better, and to save people faster.
And Eli did it. At its inception, Hatzolah was an underground organization. They used a radio that Eli bought at Radio Shack and smuggled into Israel to hack into MADA’s internal broadcasts. The minute they knew where there was an emergency, the nearest teenaged-volunteer would run over and start doing CPR, keeping the guy alive until the MADA ambulance got there. It was a bare bones operation, but it worked.
One day, a teenaged Eli Beer was manning the radio (instead of helping his father in his sefarim store), when he hears that there’s been a car accident right next to him. He races out to the street and sees a man lying there, bleeding profusely from a torn artery in his neck. Eli whips his kippah off his head, shoves it into the hole in the guy’s neck, and saves his life.
That was a good story. I would’ve loved more stories like that.
Teenage Eli, saving people with his band of undercover superheroes, grows up to be Eli Beer, the head of Ichud Hatzlolah. Hatzolah has come a long way from its humble origins. It is now a household name, and a major, organized force in saving lives. Nowadays, Hatzolah volunteers have defibrillators. And ambucycles. All of this takes money. Lots and lots of money.
At some point, the book shifts into showing how Eli becomes an incredible fundraiser. I would have been interested in reading more heartwarming stories about the work that Hatzolah volunteers do day in and day out, and less about Eli Beer’s flights all over the world, hobnobbing with the upper crust and getting million-dollar donations. This is truly a praiseworthy and wonderful thing, but as a reader it got kind of boring. Ultimately, I read the book and I even enjoyed it. But I was really hoping for more.
May 15, 2024
Eli Beer is a fascinating person and a true tzaddik (righteous person).
However, the writing of the book, or more so the editing, leaves a lot to be desired. It felt like there was no one person who read through the entire book before it was published: there was inconsistent "code switching" and Hebrew/Yiddish words that were translated and those that weren't, all in the same paragraph. [If you do not understand those languages, I would not recommend this book, as there would be too much that isn't well explained.] Likewise, the biography was not told linearly, which would be fine, but the flow was off, and there were several people who were reintroduced several times, as if their names had not come up before, and situations, which were also brought up again, without acknowledging that they already been discussed.
However, the writing of the book, or more so the editing, leaves a lot to be desired. It felt like there was no one person who read through the entire book before it was published: there was inconsistent "code switching" and Hebrew/Yiddish words that were translated and those that weren't, all in the same paragraph. [If you do not understand those languages, I would not recommend this book, as there would be too much that isn't well explained.] Likewise, the biography was not told linearly, which would be fine, but the flow was off, and there were several people who were reintroduced several times, as if their names had not come up before, and situations, which were also brought up again, without acknowledging that they already been discussed.
Read
March 28, 2023An everyday man who sets out to accomplish a goal: save 6 million lives. Failing at school, teenage Eli Beer threw himself into EMT work. But missed opportunities haunted him, and led him to found the first grassroots emergency response organization in Israel. His passion and ambition for his people led him into astonishing encounters and relationships in the quest to secure funding, feasibility, or unity. Fast-paced and current, 90 Seconds moves quickly through the history of United Hatzalah, combining the storytelling of The Rebbetzin with the “man on a mission” tone of Incredible.
April 19, 2023
The story of United Hatzalah is as fascinating as it is important. After finishing this book, my dad–a United Hatzalah donor–gave me the copy that he was given by the organization. While my dad is a donor, I am one of United Hatzalah's 6,500+ volunteer medics and I can personally attest to the incredible nature of this organization. Both of us are passionate about the organization and support it in complementary ways. If you ever wanted to read an inspiring story about an incredible organization (and the man who founded it), you must check out this book.
December 11, 2024
The best book that I've read this year! Compelling and hard to put down. Amazing from start to finish!
July 21, 2025
3.5 stars
5 for the content, 2 for the writing.
5 for the content, 2 for the writing.
September 16, 2025
Told in first person or journalistic style, this is a fast read.
Eli Beer is an amazing person!!
Eli Beer is an amazing person!!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews