“When she was born, we realized immediately that something was wrong with her heart and that she needed treatment,” said Nadia, a Druze woman from a war-affected village in Syria, speaking about her toddler in an interview with JNS.

Nadia arrived in Israel earlier this month with her daughter, in a transfer coordinated by the Israel Defense Forces and Save a Child’s Heart, the nonprofit through which her child received life-saving care.

Save a Child’s Heart treats children with congenital and rheumatic heart disease who have limited access to medical care in their home countries. Roughly eight in every 1,000 children are born with a heart defect, and half of them need treatment within their first year.