Come Be Inspired by a Modern Israeli Hero

When his helicopter crashed during the Second Lebanon War, doctors did not believe Noam Gershony would survive. In 2012, he won the gold medal in tennis at the Paralympic Games. 

Among the thousands who watched Noam Gershony win Israel’s first gold medal of the 2012 Paralympic Games on Saturday was a group wearing white T-shirts with hand-drawn blue Israeli flags on them. They were friends from his previous career as an Apache helicopter pilot for the Israeli Air Force. They had bought tickets only to the final stages of the London competition, such was their confidence in their former comrade.

Gershony’s current sporting career as a wheelchair tennis player began after his aircraft crashed and he was almost killed in action eight years ago.

“They said, ‘Take him, there’s nothing to do [for him],’ but we didn’t give up,” the doctor who saved Gershony’s life in 2006 recalled in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth on Sunday.

Gershony’s helicopter crashed during the Second Lebanon War. His copilot died on the spot and no one thought the then 23-year-old would survive his wounds. “His condition was very bad. He was bleeding from his nose, mouth and ears,” the doctor from the IDF’s elite search and rescue unit 669 told Ynet news.

But Gershony did survive. After being airlifted to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa — with an emergency stop at a Safed hospital after a respiratory collapse, and a second one in an open field when his blood pressure dropped to zero — he began the long, arduous journey back to health. And wheelchair provided an opportunity to flourish.

Four years after the crash, Gershony started playing tennis at Tel Aviv’s center for disabled veterans, and not long after that — in 2010 — he was good enough to begin playing at international level. At his first Paralympics in London, he won gold.

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