Chaya Spinner, 70, has been working as a Red Cross Water Safety Instructor Trainer and a Lifeguarding Instructor Trainer for close to fifty years. Over this time, she has trained many people, including members of her large and growing family. 

Mother of four, grandmother of fifteen, and great grandmother of six, Chaya is full of energy. She started volunteering for ARC/GNY in 1985, when she joined the

Red Cross Brooklyn Area Office's Water Safety Committee. In 2005, she was honored with the Kathryn Walter Stein Volunteer Recognition Award that recognizes a volunteer who has done exemplary work in aquatics.

Today, as the Aquatics Director at the Boro Park YM-YWHA in Brooklyn, Chaya is particularly devoted to serving the Orthodox Jewish population.  In addition to teaching 3 to 10 swimming classes a day, she offers a special Holocaust survivor program, in which she teaches and oversees an hour of swimming.

In early February 2008, after such a class, Chaya noticed one of her students having trouble. The woman kept attempting to stand and falling back into the water, and now she was face down. Chaya's lengthy Red Cross training—she began as a teenager at age 16, at the Manhattan Y and continued taking classes until she was an Instructor Trainer a few years later—sprang to the fore. Quickly, Chaya turned the woman face up in the pool. She tried to help her stand, but the woman was unable to keep herself upright.

Chaya enlisted one class member to call an ambulance and another to help keep the woman’s face out of the water. When the EMTs arrived, Chaya had thought through what needed to be done. She suggested the EMTs use her American Red Cross back board, as it was plastic and would float more easily than the wooden one they had brought. 

She strapped the woman onto the backboard, and the EMTs helped lift the woman out of the pool. The paramedic who examined the swimmer realized she was diabetic, and in shock. Immediately he gave her an injection and she started to improve. Chaya sat with the woman, reminding her of the importance of taking her medication on a regular basis so she might avoid this very situation in the future.

If you ask us, Chaya Spinner is a hero. If you ask Chaya, she will say the credit really belongs to the Red Cross and the wonderful job it has done over the years training her. She said it was amazing to her that she didn’t panic, that she simply kicked into gear and did what her training had prepared her to do: save a life.