In the past two weeks, Michelle Obama, Demi Moore, Ben Stiller, Susan Sarandon and even Sean Penn, all flew in for post-earthquake photo ops with Haitian children.

                Nothing like an earthquake of public relations Richter Scale to bring out Hollywood’s eager must-be-seen me-too-ism.

                Happily, there were some people who came for purely altruistic reasons, who received relatively little media attention, and actually helped save lives. They came from an unexpected place, Israel.

Within 24 hours of Haiti’s first tremor, an Israeli team of medics were already on the ground, doing surveillance and reconnaissance to scout out what would be needed for a “rescue mission.”

Leading the team of medics was Dr. Ofer Merin, Chief of the Israel Defense Forces Field Hospital in Haiti and Deputy Director General and Trauma Surgeon at Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem.

During the 6,000-mile flight en route to Haiti, Dr. Merin and team were apprised in real time of any changing situations on the ground. They learned that about 300,000 Haitians were injured. Every minute people died because of lack of medical attention. More than a million people became homeless. “You have to understand that everything was chaotic. There were thousands and thousands of people lying in the streets,” said Dr. Merin at a recent Toronto lecture.

In less than 72 hours, the Israeli team of medical professionals were already treating patients in a field hospital splayed out in a Port-au-Prince soccer field. It didn’t take long before word spread quickly among the survivors that the Israeli team had advanced medical equipment.

Over the course of ten days, Dr. Merin’s team treated some 250 patients daily, not including 242 operations, taking about 100 X-rays a day, delivering 16 babies, filling 70 beds, and saving over 1,100 lives.

The fully operational field hospital included radiology and maternity facilities, which caught the attention of CNN - “amazed” at the level of preparedness demonstrated by the Israeli medical teams, calling the set up “the Rolls Royce” of health care.

Even the figurehead of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, heaped praise on Israel’s response to the Haitian earthquake.

In March at Toronto’s Shaarei Shomayim Congregation, Dr. Merin recalled his team’s successes, triage dilemmas and unique challenges of the field hospital in Haiti. The event was presented by The Canadian Shaare Zedek Hospital Foundation, The Speakers Action Group, Shaarei Shomayim Congregation, and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto.

Despite the most eager preparedness, however, they could not treat the severely wounded, knowing that doing so was futile, not to mention a risk of depleting limited resources.

One 22-year-old woman who was found by the rescue team five days in, had to have her hand amputated in order to be pried out of the rubble. In a normal hospital, there’d be an emergency room working around the clock to save her. Was this an option for Dr. Merin, if he thought nothing could save her, and there are others who could be saved instead? “You cannot stand at the gate and say ‘you know, I think she has a low chance of survival, so let’s not accept her.’”

With such finite amounts of medical supplies, improvising along the way – and sheer luck - helped wiggle them out of certain emergencies.

“You have to think in a flexible way,” he said, adding that it was important to consider patients’ open limb fractures in the poorest country on Earth. “You try to salvage as much of the limb you can. The chance of an amputee to find rehab is zero. They’d never have $10,000 to find prosthesis.”

And so, the team brought with them 70 specialized orthopedic nails, at $8,000 a pop, that were placed in broken bones to help heal them. However, within four days, their supply unexpectedly ran out.

An enterprising team member drove into the city, eventually finding a blacksmith who duplicated 200 “the same as the original nails” for a few dollars. The Italian and American medical teams in other field hospitals found them useful, too.

In another miraculous story of industriousness and resourcefulness, they managed to restock the thousand limb casts that had run out within a week. Somehow, there was word the Moroccan embassy had a cache of casts stashed away in their basement. “We thought they were kidding, but it was true,” said Dr. Merin.

In short order, boxes ­- adorned with the Moroccan flag and Arabic writing - containing 3,000 casts, had been delivered to the team.

Then there was the baby admitted with severe gastric problems, with congenital lack of vitamin K. This is highly uncommon in the West and potentially fatal. Pumping plasma into the child was the solution. One of the attending physicians was quick to donate 20ccs of his own blood.

The baby was sent home a day later.

This was made all easier by the fact that the Israelis began the entire set up with an interconnected computerized system of 20 laptops - one for each tent in the field hospital. All of the patients were bar coded in order to streamline treatment, keeping track of each patient as they received various treatments.

“We didn’t have to tell the story over and over, or have to do any translating. They had a barcode to tell us,” said Dr. Merin.

In terms of what was accomplished in those ten days in Haiti, Dr. Merin’s team performed extraordinary feats of medical wonders, making a world of difference to thousands of people a half a world away.

To add to their generosity, the Israelis decided to head back with an empty cargo plane, leaving all of their state-of-the-art medical equipment to those who needed it desperately more.