Pilot shuttles patients on a high-flying mitzva
Volunteer offers time and a plane to those in need of treatments
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Jerry Krivitzky of Montclair uses his passion for flying — and his Hawker Beechcraft Bonanza — to shuttle patients to distant medical care facilities in his role as volunteer pilot for Angel Flights Northeast.
Photo courtesy Jerry Krivitzky
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September 2, 2009
When passengers ask pilot Jerry Krivitzky why he is so eager to fly them, he tells them, “Because I’m Jewish.”
Krivitzky, 51, an attorney who lives in Montclair, volunteers his time and his plane, a Hawker Beechcraft Bonanza, to fly strangers to the medical care they need anywhere on the East Coast and sometimes beyond, all through an organization known as Angel Flight.
He has, for example, been taking a five-year-old Toms River girl suffering from Metachromatic Leukodystrophy — a painful condition in which the sheathing on the neurons melts — from the airport in Somerset to Chapel Hill since she was two years old.
He flew a University of Maine sociology professor with advanced prostate cancer back and forth between Boston and Philadelphia. (The professor was a Jewish atheist. “We had some great conversations,” Krivitzky said. )
Angel Flights began on the West Coast in 1983 through the efforts of a group of pilots who saw a need for free air transport for people with medical needs. By 1997, 14 different regional branches were in operation. Today they are run virtually independently, but all fall under the umbrella organization Air Charity Network, headquartered in Virginia.
Krivitzky flies with Angel Flights Northeast, which began in 1996 and has since sponsored 14,000 flights. Patients must be stable and ambulatory to be eligible.
‘Why I fly’
The first Angel Flight Krivitzky ever took, in 2004, hooked him for life. He was as an observer, flying with a friend and fellow congregant of Temple Shalom in Succasunna. (Two years ago, he moved from Chester to Montclair and joined Temple Ner Tamid in nearby Bloomfield.)
They picked up a patient at Boston’s Logan Airport whose facial disfigurement rendered him incapable of speech and who was “clearly in the midst of some kind of reconstructive surgery.”
They flew the man and his companion to Bar Harbor, Maine. Krivitzky said he remembers the companion, telling him and the pilot: “You don’t have any idea how important what you do is to us, because he can’t be around crowds; he can’t be around people. And if we couldn’t fly this way we wouldn’t be able to get to Boston.”
That’s when Krivitzky said he had his epiphany. “This is why I’m supposed to fly,” he remembers thinking. “This is why God has blessed me with the time, the money, the ability to learn, and the expertise to do so.”
Within a month of that first flight, Krivitzky, who had begun taking flying lessons in 2001, completed all the requirements to become an Angel pilot.
Since then, he has flown over 100 Angel flights and become a trainer for other pilots. He also traded in his Cessna Skylane, his first plane, for the Bonanza, which offers a larger cabin and easier entry and exit. He wrote Tefilat Hashamayim, his own version of Tefilat Haderech, the Traveler’s Prayer, which hangs in his plane, and he placed a mezuza on the entrance.
Several times each month, Krivitzky, who works for his wife’s family business, Skinder-Strauss Associates, a Newark publisher, heads over to Caldwell Airport, where he keeps his plane. More than half his passengers are cancer patients undergoing experimental treatments. Many are children. Passengers pay nothing for the service.
“These people have been through the wringer; they are usually trying a medical option of last resort,” he said. “They have already gone through anger and denial and are well past acceptance; they are just trying to find the meaning in their days and lives.” Often, just after dropping them off, he says a Misheberach, the traditional prayer for healing.
Sometimes Krivitzky develops a connection with passengers and takes them on repeat trips, like the professor with prostate cancer, who later died of his illness.
Other clients are not so sympathetic, like the fellow with an advanced case of Lyme Disease whom he flew to eastern Long Island. “He was nasty and surly — treated me like a bad cab driver,” he said. But it didn’t diminish Krivitzky’s enthusiasm. “I’m not doing it for him; I do it for myself and for my relationship with God.”
Today he calls Angel Flights “the mitzva tattooed on my forehead,” referring to a favorite teaching of Rabbi Joel Soffin, now rabbi emeritus of Temple Shalom of Succasunna.
Soffin explained the notion to NJJN by phone: “It occurred to me that perhaps all of us have a mitzva that especially speaks to us in a particular way, and that perhaps every Jew has a mitzva tattooed on their forehead.” He teaches people that once they discover what the mitzva is, “nothing will hold you back.”
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