7 Films on a Jumbotron

I have been making videos for Healing Hearts for years, and this was the second gala I covered for them. The first was their inaugural gala in November 2024, at the Panthers' War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. Over 700 people came. Shulem Lemmer sang, and opened with a tribute to the IDF.

That night they dedicated Avery's Kitchen to Avery Cohen, a young boy who lost his fight with cancer that year, and a sefer Torah in memory of Ariel Burgan. Yael Portell, a young patient, came up on stage with her family and was surprised with a giant version of the teddy bear that got her through her hospital stay. They honored David and Chayala Salomon, Naftali and Leora Klein, and Dr. Yehuda Deutsch.

Then Rabbi Klein showed the plans for the Healing Hearts Center, and the room raised money toward it. This is the recap of that night:

The feature film, and the longest of the seven. It tells the story of Healing Hearts itself, from a young couple’s idea in 2005 to everything it runs now.

The middle of it belongs to a girl named Nava. She was diagnosed on a Friday and started chemo that night, and Rabbi Klein was the first person to come see the family, the next day, with challah. It ends on the new Healing Hearts Center, built and ready, and the ask.

The feature has its own page.

Two boys, two families, and a lot of time in hospitals. Juda got sick on a family ski trip to Colorado and ended up in emergency surgery. He was four. Yakov Gajar’s family spent Rosh Hashanah in the hospital with him.

Rabbi Yochanon and Esti Klein stayed with both families, down to Esti’s spicy spaghetti after appointments and a secret identity, Agent Tuchus, that Rabbi Klein made up to get Yakov to smile. In the hospital the two boys started talking to each other on walkie-talkies. That is where the title comes from.

Rabbi Dovie and Chaya Shapiro are Chabad shluchim in Flagstaff, Arizona. They are usually the ones helping. Then their son Avremi was badly hurt in a fall in Argentina, thousands of miles away, and after emergency surgery there he was brought to Miami.

Rabbi Klein told the family Healing Hearts was there 24/7, and Chavie Drang, one of their patient care coordinators, stopped everything to take their call. While Avremi was in the ICU, Healing Hearts gave the family a house for the younger kids and connected them to the doctors they needed. He went from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane.

This one meant shooting in Arizona, a different state, which was very cool.

Shmuly and Aleza Ainsworth were honoured with the Pillar of Generosity. The film is about Tzvi & Itty’s Home of Healing in Miami Beach, a home for families going through a medical crisis, made in memory of Shmuly’s parents. His sister, Chana Wasserman, designed it.

It has three apartments, and they are always full, with families coming back from chemo, from surgery, or from another long day at the hospital. One of them, Benny Cohen, came from Israel with his wife, who needed a lung transplant. He turns up again in the Dr. Pipkin film.

Meyer and Chaya Rivka Fischl give to causes all over the world, and this year Healing Hearts honoured them as Champion of the Heart. A cousin in North Miami introduced them to Rabbi Klein, who walked them through a building that was still only a plan for the new center, then took them to the hospital to see the work. They joined after that.

The film also tells the story Meyer plays down. In 2015 he donated a kidney to a stranger through Renewal. The man has nine children and is a great-grandfather now. Meyer calls it no big deal. If Healing Hearts had been at Mount Sinai in New York back then, he says, at least his wife would have had something to eat in the four hours she sat outside the operating room.

Dr. Mauricio Pipkin is the surgical director of the ECMO program at the Lung Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, and Healing Hearts honoured him as Guardian of the Heart. The film opens on University of Miami football and turns to another team a few miles away, the one that fights for every breath.

At the center of it is Benny Cohen. He and his wife came from Israel because she needed a lung transplant. When the lungs came in, Dr. Pipkin was about to leave on a family vacation to Brazil. He told Mr. Cohen he was not going.

The Rosh Chodesh Club is a group of Jewish Latina women from Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and beyond. Raquel Susterman brought them to Healing Hearts. Rabbi Klein was there for her when her mother was sick, and after her mother passed away she came up to the Healing Hearts team at a Hanukkah toy drive, said she wanted to volunteer, and kept calling.

Now the women come in on Mondays and prep thousands of meals. More than 200 want in, and Raquel picks eight for each Monday because that is the most they can take. Healing Hearts honoured Alberto and Raquel Susterman and the club with the Heart of Chesed.

The dinner was a smashing success. More than a thousand people came to Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, and the films played on the arena’s jumbotron, above the tables.