Dr. Samuel Esterson worked as a physical therapist in Baltimore for nearly five decades, spending most of that time at his own practice. So a few years ago, when the white-haired Esterson sat down in a room in Israel to take the nation’s physical therapy licensing exam, he got some sideways glances from his much younger peers.

“They thought maybe I was a plant from the Ministry of Health to see who’s playing around during the test,” he joked.

The truth behind Esterson taking that test — which he passed, by the way — is inspiring.

Over the last couple of years, Esterson has volunteered with an organization called ADI Negev, using his expertise in medicine to help injured soldiers and civilians in Israel who were injured in war and terror attacks. But while just going to Israel and volunteering would have sufficed, Esterson took it a step further — he studied for about 300 total hours to become licensed in Israel, learning to adapt his skills to the medical customs of the world’s only Jewish state and help make things more familiar for his patients.

“I feel like I’m really part of the team there when I go there because not only am I a volunteer there, I’m certified and I’m licensed there, and I speak their language and I’m able to communicate with them and with the patients,” Esterson said.

The Pikesville resident and Suburban Orthodox Congregation Toras Chaim member first traveled to Israel with ADI Negev soon after the Gaza war began. He said the patients he helped treat were suffering from a variety of injuries.

“The first time that I went, which was soon after the war started, the population was pretty much divided between civilians that were injured in the city of Ofakim, which is the area where the hospital is located and was devastated initially by the massacre, and middle-aged and older people that would fall on their way running to a bomb shelter and fracture a hip or break a shoulder,” Esterson said. “We saw those types of orthopedic injuries, mostly post-surgical, and the other half or so of the population were the injured soldiers following their trauma in Gaza.”

Despite the severity of the medical care that was being provided, Esterson said the environment was one that led to a lot of smiles and pats on the back.

“If you’ve ever had physical therapy before in this type of environment, it’s very upbeat, it’s very jocular, it’s very motivating. There’s … talking going on and interaction between all the different patients that are there,” Esterson said.

A unique element that furthered this dynamic is the closeness that ADI Negev doctors develop with patients due to constant proximity to each other.

“It’s totally different because I was living on the hospital campus. All day long, we’re seeing the patient … I would go home and change into regular clothes out of my scrubs and grab dinner in the cafeteria, and the patients were there and we’d hang out and talk and joke around,” Esterson said.

The ADI Negev campus is located less than 24 miles miles from the Gaza Strip, but Esterson said that he feels safer in Israel than he does in the United States.

“Going out and walking on the streets, going to a restaurant or picking up a falafel on the corner, there wasn’t even an issue as it relates to being apprehensive or fearful of going out,” he said.

For Esterson, doing what he can to help Israel is just part of who he is. Raised in a religious Zionist family, he attended summer camp and day schools that taught him the importance of Israel to the worldwide Jewish community. Esterson picked up Hebrew while working on a kibbutz for a year after high school, but despite all his travels to the Jewish homeland, he had never done any medical work there before.

“Pretty much every summer [or] every second summer, I would return to Israel to either volunteer in the kibbutz or travel or tour. Even after I finished physical therapy school, I would go there, but I never really worked in physical therapy there at all,” he said.

There are a lot of ways a retiree can spend their time and indulge themselves, but what Esterson is doing matters a lot to other people. The plan for now? Go back and do it all again as soon as he’s able to. He hopes that will be this fall.

“I feel like I have a very good connection with not only the faculty and the staff there, the director of orthopedics there — we’re very close and we’re constantly in contact — I’m also in contact with a lot of the patients I’ve treated, especially the soldiers from over the years, which has been a real positive thing,” he said. “I’m hoping to go back. I don’t know exactly when, but if they’ll have me, I’ll be back.”

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com