In some ways, Miriam Lubling is like a politician. She adeptly skirts questions she doesn’t like, refusing to be pinned down on her age or the number of grandchildren she has. She has also earned celebrity like status in her chasidic Brooklyn neighborhood.

But Mrs. Lubling, the founder of Rivkah Laufer Bikur Cholim, an organization that helps Jewish patients when they are hospitalized or ill, is more focused on getting things done for others than she is in gaining recognition for herself. Her personal story is marked by unimaginable hardship, yet she has turned herself into a foundation of support, inspiration, and action for her community.

It would be impossible to mention all of her accomplishments (and there are many), without first saying that she escaped Poland in 1939 at the beginning of the Holocaust. Her family arranged for her and one of her sisters to flee to Tel Aviv. But her parents and other siblings were not able to get out. All died at the hands of the Nazis.

She presses on with a keen awareness of that life-altering experience. Her life has had other profound twists and turns. A little less than a decade after the war, her husband, whom she met in Tel Aviv, fell in the shower and hit his head.

For the next two years he was in and out of hospitals in Israel. In 1955 the couple, along with their three children, moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, so that he could get medical care in America.

That is when Mrs. Lubling first emerged as the patient advocate she is widely known as now. With her husband in need of care, she tirelessly sought out doctors and researched the best medical treatments. It was then that she realized patients did not have much help.

It was a natural role. In 1965 she founded the Rivkah Laufer chapter of Bikur Cholim, which she named for a friend of hers from synagogue who died that year. Her chapter, which, like many others, has several hundred volunteers, predominately helps Jewish patients. It arranges medical care, assists them with chores, delivers meals to them, and visits them in the hospital.

“Everyone who comes to a doctor sees a doctor as a god,” Mrs. Lubling said in her thick Polish accent, during an interview in her Boro Park apartment. “I show them that doctors are plain human beings; that he needs you too, he is not doing you a favor.”

Her advocacy work does not stop with Bikur Cholim. She is also the director of services for Holocaust victims at the Boro Park Jewish Community Council and is involved with Ohel Children’s Home and Services, a social service agency for Jews. The president of Ohel, Moishe Hellman, said of Mrs. Lubling: “There isn’t anyone in the Jewish community in Boro Park who doesn’t know her. The best way to describe her is as the Jewish Mother Theresa.”

“You can go into a hospital at mid night and find her there,” he said. “You’ll see her trying to get a bed for someone or advocating to get someone treated in the emergency room. She’s always fighting for people.”

Though she ran a kindergarten for many years in addition to her patient advocacy work, she now devotes herself almost exclusively to making appointments, finding doctors, and helping resolve medical problems for those in need of assistance. Many of her days are spent at New York University Medical Center, where she is an associate trustee, but she works with Maimonides, Mount Sinai, Lenox Hill, and dozens of other institutions. At NYU she gets daily lists of Jewish patients from the hospital’s rabbis. Those are the lists that guide her to each new patient.

“She calls on these doctors day and night,” said an NYU rabbi, Mordecai Katz. “She’s been doing this for years. All of the doctors know her. Many of them were interns and residents when she started and are now chiefs of departments.”

If the organization comes across a non-Jewish patient who needs help, she makes sure they get assistance, too. “If somebody in the same room says it smells good, we always offer it to them,” she said, referring to the meals her organization delivers.

Her cell phone and beeper are rarely silent. The other day as she attempted to serve this reporter cut-up melon, she also managed to squeeze in business calls.

“Is Dr. Colvin there?” she said into the phone as she called the office of an NYU cardiologist. “I need an appointment for my very good friend. She needs a valve replacement. Is it possible to do it Thursday?”

Sure enough, the appointment was set. Mrs. Lubling, who will only admit to being over 80, has the energy of a young woman. She also says she is 5-foot-4, but does so with a smirk and when you see her petite frame it is clear that her estimate is either off or that she’s bending the truth.

She handles living on the second floor of her brick walk-up with ease and barely stops moving between the rooms of her apartment. Proclamations and awards hang in a spare bedroom and local newspaper clippings about her work are kept tucked away in cabinets. Her tables and walls are adorned with photos of her three married children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. And she has no trouble rifling through cabinets, even if it means getting down on her knees to get to the bottom shelves, to dig out pictures of herself next to political players like Senator Clinton to show to guests.

Council Member Simcha Felder, who represents her neighborhood, nominated Mrs. Lubling for the Brooke Russell Astor Award, which she won, in 2002. The award is given annually by the New York Public Library to individuals who devote themselves to community service.

Mr. Felder described her as “modest” and “forceful,” joking that she could get anyone an appointment with NYU’s top doctors right away, even if the doctor is booked for months solid.

“When Mrs. Lubling calls they make the appointment whether they like it or not,” Mr. Felder said. “You can’t refuse her. You know she isn’t getting paid, you know what she’s been through. How can anyone possibly say no?”

“I think she really puts us all on the spot,” he added. “She’s a living lesson in life. Even when she was sick, she was on her cell phone from her hospital bed making appointments for other people. She never stops.”

When this reporter asked her how she remains so active and involved she evaded the question, but when Mr. Felder asked awhile back, she invoked the Yiddish phrase min geit und min tracht nisht, meaning “You just go, you don’t think about it.”