Marilyn Berger

Marilyn Berger is 74. That’s significant for a couple of reasons: It marks the 45th year of her journalistic and writing career, and it marks one year since she became a mother for the first time. But she’ll tell you that that’s beside the point; the real story is that of Dr. Rick Hodes.
The American physician is the subject of Berger’s book, “This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes” (William Morrow, 2010), which the author will discuss at the JCC of Eastern Fairfield County on Wednesday, Mar. 9 at 7:30 p.m.
A contributing writer to the New York Times, Berger was a diplomatic correspondent for Newsday and the Washington Post, and was the United Nations correspondent for ABC News and the White House correspondent for NBC News.
“This Is a Soul” follows Dr. Rick Hodes, a Modern Orthodox American Jew who went to Ethiopia during the famine of the mid-‘80s and is still there, treating the sickest of the sick in one of the poorest countries on earth.

"This Is a Soul: The Mission of Rick Hodes" follows Dr. Rick Hodes and his work in Ethiopia

“He truly believes and lives the Talmudic teaching, ‘Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world,'” Berger says. Her own journey to saving a life began two years ago, when she first learned of Hodes’s work.
A Brooklyn native, Berger was working for the Permanent Mission of Afghanistan to the U.N. when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and she was tapped to anchor the U.N.’s televised proceedings on the military action. After a stint at Newsday, covering the 1968 U.S.-Vietnam peace talks in Paris, she relocated to Washington, D.C. to work for the Washington Post as a diplomatic correspondent, then signed on with NBC to cover the Pentagon and the White House. That’s when she met Don Hewitt, creator of “60 Minutes.” The two married and moved to New York. For the next 30 years, she worked in journalism and TV.
Two years ago, Berger learned about Hodes from her college roommate, who had met the doctor on a trip to Ethiopia and asked Berger if she knew anyone who would want to write Hodes’s story. Berger grabbed the opportunity and flew to Ethiopia.
Rick Hodes is a Jewish doctor from Syosset, Long Island who first went to Ethiopia in 1984 with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to tend to those affected by a widespread famine and to set up health programs. While there, his only link to the outside world was BBC Radio. He would listen every Saturday morning to Hugo Gabriel Gryn, a British Reform rabbi who was a Holocaust survivor and a longtime BBC radio personality. When Hodes returned to the U.S., he began studying Judaism, eventually becoming Modern Orthodox.
In the late ’80s, while studying at a yeshiva in Jerusalem Hodes learned about the plight of the Ethiopian Jews, and wrote to the JDC offering his help. In 1991, he returned to Ethiopia to help with Operation Solomon, when some 14,000 Jews were evacuated to Israel.
Hodes remained in Addis Ababa after the evacuation to help the Jews who had stayed behind. He began volunteering at Mother Teresa’s mission, where he met two young brothers who both were suffering from tuberculosis of the spine. He was able to arrange surgery for them but couldn’t cover the expense, so he did something remarkable, adopting the brothers so that they could be on his health-insurance plan. The boys traveled to Texas for the surgery. Hodes has since adopted three more boys and has taken another 15 into his own home to feed and clothe them, and to send them to private school in Ethiopia.
Berger first traveled to Ethiopia in 2009. Near the end of her trip, she saw a little boy begging on an Addis Ababa street. “He was maybe 4 years old, his arms were the width of a garden hose, and his hand was reaching for the sky, trying to collect coins,” she says. “He was sitting on his haunches; his green shirt was covering a back with tuberculosis of the spine, which I could diagnose after a week in Ethiopia. The person I was with said, ‘You’re supposed to give to the organizations, not the kids,’ so we walked away, but I was haunted.”
Berger told Hodes about the boy and Rick said, ‘Let’s go find him.’”
The boy’s name was Danny, and Hodes brought him to Mother Teresa’s mission. A Ghanaian-born American doctor, who brings a surgical team to Ghana twice a year to perform back surgery on children, offered to do the operation. On a return trip to Ethiopia, Berger stopped in Ghana to check on Danny and to observe the surgeons at work. Danny went home to Ethiopia, and because he couldn’t go to school while recovering, Berger asked Hodes if she and Don could host him in the U.S.
“My husband and I fell in love with him and we decided that we should keep him with us,” she says. Don died of pancreatic cancer a few months later. “In August 2009, at the age of 74, I had this little fellow in my life and I became a mother for the first time,” Berger says. (Danny is officially the adopted son of Rick Hodes; he is legally in the U.S. on a student visa.)
Berger has never seen herself as a “do-gooder;” sometimes altruism is a by-product. “I was walking back from Danny’s school one morning recently and I have really bad feet and thought, ‘I could have said, ‘I’m 74, I don’t need this. My feet hurt and I can’t do this,’” she says. “I could have turned away. I had a sick husband. But it was one of these things that happened and now that I’m in the position I’m in, I’m able to help Rick in his work.”
While surgery like Danny’s is performed free of charge, Hodes must raise between $10,000 and $15,000 for each patient’s transportation and living expenses, even though he himself lives hand to mouth, says Berger. Berger donates a portion of her book royalties to Hodes for his work. He has been selected as a recipient of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Medal of Valor.
But perhaps accidentally, Berger has become an inspiration to others. “I hope to convey a sense of the joy one gets from doing good things, from compassion and altruism,” she says. “There are studies that show that people who do good are happier than those who don’t. I have learned that, by doing good in my way, I am a happier person than I ever have been and than I thought I could be. I hope people come away with a desire to help Rick, because I think this is a worthy cause.”

For more information on Marilyn Berger’s talk call (203) 372-6567, ext. 127