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With the Israel Defense Forces coming under siege in the media for the Gaza flotilla incident, community members at Highland Park Conservative Temple-Congregation Anshe Emeth on June 10 heard a much different story from a reporter who witnessed the IDF's heroism in Haiti.

E.B. Solomont, New York correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, recounted her time reporting from the IDF base camp in the Haitian capitol of Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated the country in January. Israel has "taken a beating" from the flotilla incident, Solomont said, and "it's hard to believe that a few months ago there was a whole different set of headlines" after Israel treated more than 1,100 patients in Haiti.

Solomont said one of the most poignant operations she watched in Haiti was the Israeli search and rescue team's attempt to save a girl's life in a deserted apartment building. Israeli teams made a point of finding apartments, schools, and homes where no other teams attempted rescue efforts, she said, and this particular building was up in the hills in the poorest part of Port-au-Prince, with the backdrop of a deep valley containing homes in ruin and flickers of smoke.

Using Max, a dog trained to smell human breath, a handheld heartbeat detector, and a Doppler radar to detect motion, the team searched eight hours for a girl because her father was convinced she was still alive. The team brought out floodlights come nightfall and persisted to search in the pitch black darkness at the 10-hour mark of the mission, Solomont recalled, then renewed the mission for another two hours after Max renewed his barking to indicate a sign of life.

Ultimately, the team found nothing, and as they drove back to their base with the windows down, Haitians stuck out their arms to touch the soldiers. One frustrated soldier told a civilian "Don't thank us, we didn't find her, we failed," Solomont said, but the civilian responded "No, thank you for checking, thank you for looking."

"Every time I tell the story I wish that it could have a positive outcome," Solomont said.

Even after failing to find the girl, the IDF didn't give up and went right back to work the next day, and would go on to find survivors as much as two weeks after the earthquake, Solomont said.

Two days after the earthquake, Solomont received an email from her editor asking "Would you be willing to go to Haiti? Do you want to go to Haiti?" She spent 12 hours trying to figure out how to get there, concluding that the best plan was to fly to the Dominican Republic and drive from there to Haiti with two Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries from Santo Domingo.

However, when she arrived in Santo Domingo, Solomont discovered that the Chabad rabbis cancelled their trip to Port-au-Prince. Her editor responded: "Well, you are halfway there, keep going." Solomont eventually found her way there with two Dominican reporters.

"I know how to count to 10 and I can say agua, that's basically it," Solomont said of her Spanish language skills.

The scene at Port-au-Prince was "extraordinarily grim," Solomont said, with homeless people, tent cities, the national palace still smoldering, and the stench from dead bodies. She said she didn't initially know where the IDF camp was, and her editor instructed her to "just go into Port-au-Prince, listen for Hebrew, and I'm sure you'll find the Israelis."

Solomont lucked out when she met a New York Times reporter who had a tip on where the IDF was located. An IDF spokesperson greeted the two reporters at the camp's entrance with a simple hello to the Times writer but a hearty "Bruchim habaim!" to Solomont when she mentioned she worked for the Jerusalem Post.

The camp was a "bright spot" amidst the carnage in Haiti, Solomont said, with a field hospital, a dozen tents, a newborn unit, and an operating room.

"Here was a place that there actually was some order," she said.

To explain how the IDF was able to respond to the crisis in Haiti so quickly, Solomont gave the crowd background on the country's Jewish history. Today, there are 25 Jews in Haiti, she said, but the community at one point reached a peak of 300. Three waves of Jewish immigration included in the 13th century from Brazil, the 17th and 18th centuries from Syria and Lebanon, and a final wave in the 19th and 20th centuries. The second wave was important because it set the stage for the presence of Gilbert Bigio, a Syrian Jew and telecommunications entrepreneur, in the region, Solomont said.

Bigio wasn't in Haiti for the earthquake, but his son Reuven was. Amos Radyan, Israel's ambassador to the Dominican Republic, contacted the Bigio family right after the earthquake and went from Santo Domingo to Haiti to bring generators, water, and all the other infrastructure that was necessary to set up the IDF base camp. In Israel, the Home Front Command unit dispatched an early advance team to work their network in Haiti, Solomont said.

When Solomont interviewed IDF Lt. Col. Sami Yehezkel, he said his mission was to make sure supplies were there for Israelis when they landed in Haiti, and ultimately, the IDF was operational just 16 hours arriving on the scene.

On Solomont's second day in Haiti, she met an American doctor who said that in the United Nations hospitals there were no supplies and water. The IDF field hospital, however, was fully stocked with incubators and respirators and even had telecommunications capability. Israeli doctors were able to send scanned X-ray images to Israel for analysis, Solomont said.

"They were really able to do sophisticated procedures from a field hospital," she said.

The IDF was in Haiti for two weeks, after which they could go home because the U.S. had set up their hospital. Solomont said the best question she has been asked about Haiti (from a 3rd grader at Maimonides School in Boston, her alma mater) is if she cried during her time there. She said she cries sometimes when she looks at pictures from her trip that bring back memories, but actually didn't cry while she was there because she was so focused on getting her job done.

Rabbi Eliot Malomet, leader of Highland Park Conservative Temple-Congregation Anshe Emeth, told The Jewish State that it was important for the community to hear about the IDF's heroism in Haiti because "we are living in a moment of such tremendous hatred against the Jewish people and Israel." The community needs to "amplify the truth" and the great things that Israel does, Malomet said, because the world frequently condemns Israel for "disproportionate responses to terror" but never takes note of Israel's disproportionate humanitarian responses.