BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

I stood my ground and continued to march to my own drum. I married Neomi, nee Gutman, who was also active in a pioneering Zionist movement and had chosen to study nursing to become a nurse in Israel. After my period of specialization at the Jewish Hospital in Buenos Aires and acquaintance with the ‘commoditized’ medicine practiced by Argentine Jews at the time, Neomi and I made aliyah to Israel in 1953. At the close of 1952, on the eve of our aliyah , I wrote a letter to the Clalit Sick Fund’s directorate, which at the time insured the majority of Israeli citizens. I requested they find me employment in rural villages on the border and development towns in the Negev 2 The shortage of doctors was so dire that within ten days I already received a detailed reply signed by Clalit’s head of medical manpower, Dr. Leon Goldman 3 In his reply, he detailed the settlements where I would serve as a doctor: The largest community where most of the medical work in the vicinity was concentrated at the time was Kibbutz Gvar’am, hugging the border with Gaza. Surrounding Gvar’am, two new immigrant settlements had been established. These were semi-collective agricultural villages of small family farms. Beit Shikma was founded by immigrants from Tripoli (Libya), and Moshav Geha was founded by Holocaust survivors. There were also two more kibbutzim in the area -- Kibbutz Erez and Kibbutz Talmei Yafe. After our aliyah , we went to live in Gvar’am so I could serve as an on-site district doctor.

2 A development town is an urban locality (town or city) established in the periphery during the 1950s in order to disperse the population, which was composed mainly of new immigrants, throughout the State of Israel. Most of the development towns were built in the Galilee and the Negev, which were sparsely populated areas compared to the central area and Jerusalem. The program proposed dispersing the immigrant population in a controlled manner in 24 defined districts throughout the country, so that the population in the major cities would continue to constitute about 45% of the urban population, while the remaining 55% would be directed to medium-sized cities and towns. This was the practice of an idea that later became known as the "Development Towns", which was a kind of Israeli version of the "New Town" concept that was introduced in Europe after World War II. 3 Dr. Leon Goldman (1914-2014) was born in Galicia (eastern Poland under the Austro-Hungary Empire), studied medicine in Italy, served as a military doctor in the Red Army, and, as a member of the retreating Anders' Army, immigrated to Israel in 1943. From 1947-1950, he served as a physician in the DP (Displaced Person) camps in Italy and France. From 1950, he was a Clalit doctor, among the pioneers in rehabilitation of chronically ill and elderly patient care in Clalit and was among the founders of Harzfeld Geriatric Rehab Hospital in Gadera, Beit Loewenstein Rehab Hospital in Ra’anana and Beit Rivka Geriatric Center in Petach Tikva. Levi Nissim, Levi Yael - Rofeha shel Eretz-Israel 1799-1948 (The Land of Israel’s Physicians 1799-1948), Bahor Publishers, 3rd edition 2017, p. 166. Henceforth, Levi, The Land of Israel’s Doctors.

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