BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

CHAPTER 1 From Argentina to Israel: Personal Background:

I was born in the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, in 1928 -- the grandson of Jewish immigrants who in 1900 immigrated to Argentina from Slonim, in Eastern Europe (then in Poland; today in Belarus). Their immigration was fueled by the initiative of the German Jewish banker and philanthropist, the Baron de Hirsch, who sought to solve the distress of Eastern European Jews by establishing agricultural settlements in South America, Argentina in particular. My grandfather settled in the agricultural sector of Moises Ville, one of three main townships in the history of Eastern European Jewish settlement in Argentina. It is interesting to note that while he immigrated to Argentina, grandfather prayed three times a day: “May our eyes behold your return to Zion.” Not only that; in the earliest stages of settlement in South America, its youth also organized in their villages into Zionist movement frameworks. My late father immigrated to Argentina with his father when he was still young, and from his youth he was an ardent Zionist, very dedicated to the Zionist movement, and he maintained a traditional religiously observant lifestyle. Seeing to it that his children would receive a Jewish education was deep set in his soul, particularly in regard to my education. As soon as I began to attend an Argentine elementary school in the mornings, my father also enrolled me in an afternoon studies program -- the first and only school at the time where they taught modern spoken ‘Hebrew in Hebrew’ with envoy teachers from the Land of Israel. Thus, I learned fluent Hebrew, as well as studying Talmud with a private tutor. All of my youth I was very active in the Zionist movement. For years, I served as general secretary of all the youth movements and Zionist hubs of Jewish youth in Argentina, and I viewed immigration to Israel (‘making aliyah ’) as the essence of Zionist endeavor. My view was that that true Zionism was expressed in aliyah , and I believed there was no justification for a person who viewed themselves as a Zionist to remain in the Diaspora -- particularly after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. I dared to express my position at the Latin American Zionist Congress. The Israeli envoys who came to the Congress from Mandate Palestine weren’t thrilled with such sentiments, perhaps because they thought the country was not yet ready to absorb aliyah . For my part, I planned on making aliyah and took steps to prepare myself. After I finished high school, at first, I thought to study law, thumbing through international law texts for several weeks. But I knew that the Jewish state-in-the-making didn’t need jurists, it needed doctors -- leading me to the decision to study medicine. This was the first but not the last step in my life to express the linkage between my Zionist outlook and my work in the health system. This tie would run like a thread in everything I will recap in this book about my actions in the health system in Israel. Permit me to share at this juncture an interesting anecdote: When I began my medical studies. I was celebrating my birthday at my house. My mother had prepared refreshments, and friends from the pioneering youth movement I belonged to were participating. I thought it was an apt opportunity to announce that I was not going to follow the movement’s expectations from me, i.e., preparing myself for aliyah through hands-on experience in Argentina in farming in preparation for life on a kibbutz. Rather, I was studying medicine and planned to make aliyah afterwards and become a doctor in Israel. One of the female members of my group, who afterward made aliyah to Kibbutz Gazit in the Galilee and wrote a book about that, intervened. She said that I should be booted out of the movement. She considered Zionism as only preparation for life on a kibbutz, and my desire to be an academic and a doctor in Israel stood in contradiction to Zionism.

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