When Michael Biton was elected three years ago as mayor of Yeruham, he discovered that the southern town didn’t have a nighttime emergency medical center because the government hadn’t allocated a budget for a doctor. So he went to raise funds from “lovely people from France,” and since then the town has had a doctor on duty until midnight. The government promised to add the funds necessary to pay for a doctor for the whole night, but three years have since passed and Biton is still waiting.
There was also no ambulance in the town, so he got one through his connections with Eli Bin, the director of Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency medical service. And he’s funding the special investment in education through donations of 8 million shekels [more than $2 million] a year. Reality has turned Biton into an entrepreneurial expert in closing social gaps through philanthropy.
