Excerpts

Instead of marrying at age 16, Shlomo Molla was trekking 780 kilometers, or 485 miles, across Ethiopia and Sudan with 15 friends from his native Gondar Province. He had grown up with a Zionist ideology and was trying to reach Israel.

He believed Israel was the Promised Land, a homeland for all the Jews in the Diaspora (dispersion throughout the world).

“We grew up with the story of Exodus, how Moshe got others to walk to Israel. It’s a mitzva. We weren’t naive. We’d be crossing the jungle and the desert. But we decided to take a chance.”

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The small round tent came with a metal bed frame and jute sack. “There’s a bed, but where’s the mattress?” they asked the kibbutz manager.

“Is there a sack on the bed?” he replied.

“Yes.”

“Go to the cowshed and get straw to fill the sack. That’s your mattress.”

The young couple did exactly that, making the tent their home on Feb. 1, 1947.

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Lior and another heart surgeon open Rosalinda’s chest, splitting the sternum in half with an oscillating saw. We can see her heart beating through a hole in her brown skin. The doctors use solution to arrest her heart — flat-line it — so it will not beat while they are working inside of it.

Quietly, methodically, the doctors use scissors to open her heart — and are surprised to find more holes than expected. They patch and seal each one with a surgical cloth called a GORE-TEX graft. It’s just after 10:30 a.m., and appropriately, somewhere in the room Louis Armstrong is belting out “What a Wonderful World” over the music system.

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