Nicki Salfer’s near-death experience and the painful stillbirth she endured led her to embark on a new path in life — one that has helped tens of thousands of children and their parents.
Twenty years ago, after suffering a stillbirth, Salfer founded Tree of Knowledge, an educational service for students with special needs. She details this journey in her new memoir, “Fire! Ready… Aim!” and is pledging part of the proceeds from her book tour to Yad Sarah Center in Jerusalem. The center provides free or low-cost therapy and wellness services to women who have experienced stillbirth, supporting an average of 22 women each month. Salfer hopes to help more women suffering this profound loss find healing at Yad Sarah Center.
Salfer was born in Israel to American parents who had made aliyah, but when she was four years old, her grandfather was sick, and the family returned to the U.S. to be near him. They ended up staying. When Salfer was 19 years old, she got married and had two children, a girl and a boy. Then, during her third pregnancy in 1998, something went terribly wrong.
Following a difficult pregnancy, a few days before her due date, she was rushed to the hospital in Cleveland, Ohio and underwent a C-section. Despite being assured that everything was fine, the baby didn’t survive.
“It was a full abruption of the uterus — the placenta separated. Normally, when that happens, you bleed, but I had no blood coming out. It was all coming up and exploded inside of me,” she said.
This near-death experience and the loss of her baby prompted Salfer to reevaluate what she wanted to do with her life. At the time, along with her husband, Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Salfer, she was managing an office supply company and a tutoring business, but she felt unfulfilled.
“I wanted to do something more meaningful in this world,” she said. “I didn’t want to focus on helping women who had experienced the same thing like me because it was too painful, but I wanted to help children with special needs. That’s what led me to found Tree of Knowledge.”
Opened in 1999, Tree of Knowledge was the first school in Ohio designed for children unable to physically attend school. The school served four distinct groups: Children receiving in-home or hospital instruction because they were too sick to attend regular school; special-needs Orthodox Jewish children who attended Orthodox Jewish day schools in the morning and came to Tree of Knowledge for a delayed-start program; inner-city students who attended all day and a combination of students from all these groups.
Today, Tree of Knowledge has chapters in Miami, Cleveland, New York and New Jersey; a new one will open in Los Angeles soon.
The Centers provide a large array of services including counseling, tutoring, physical therapy, occupational therapy, social-emotional learning, parental support and more. These services are offered free of charge to parents and are fully funded by the government and school districts.
“We work with kids from birth to college,” Salfer said. “For some, it’s a very short-term experience — like when a child gets sick for example and our services become a lifeline until they can return to regular school. For others, especially those dealing with mental health challenges, we support them all the way through high school.”
Salfer, a psychologist with a BA in business and a master’s in Special Education and in Jewish Education, began writing her book 20 years ago. It was a work in progress, starting with that fateful day in 1998 when she nearly lost her life. The book explores her out-of-body experience, the founding of her nonprofit organization, the birth of her third child, Bracha (blessing in Hebrew), her journey through motherhood and how a young Jewish politician in Ohio, Josh Mandel, helped her raise money.
When Mandel was deployed to Iraq in 2007, she promised to send him letters, which she included in the book.
When Mandel was deployed to Iraq in 2007, she promised to send him letters, which she included in the book. Through these letters, Salfer tells the story of Tree of Knowledge — fascinating, humorous, at times frustrating and challenging and at times hopeful and encouraging — delivered in a captivating way that anyone who has ever started a non-profit can relate to.
“I made a promise to myself to write a book that would give hope to others at the forefront of education, fighting for a good cause,” Salfer writes in her book.
Salfer has three children and is already a grandmother. The damage to her uterus allowed her to have only one more child; it was too risky to have more.
“I had so much scar tissue and they had to make a choice — if they put back the uterus, they knew it wouldn’t be functional. It still looks bad. Every time a doctor does an ultrasound, they say, ‘What is that?’”
She admitted that it wasn’t easy living in an Orthodox community, married to a rabbi and having “only” three children. “I lived in a neighborhood where the average family had 10 kids. People were wondering why I don’t have more.”
While it raised eyebrows and whispers among people in her community, in the secular world people didn’t hesitate asking her directly, why she doesn’t have more kids. Don’t all Orthodox women have a football team at home? “It was painful at first,” she said, “but not anymore.”
Founding Tree of Knowledge and helping 25,000 children and their families each year helped her heal that pain long ago.
“Fire! Ready….Aim!” is available for purchase on Amazon
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