BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

jeep in the direction of Kaplan Hospital in Rechovot and it turned over. I arrived at Kaplan’s ER as a patient. In fact, the ER at the new hospital would only open to the public several weeks later, but they treated me for my injuries, which left me with a nice scar to this day. This road accident was a critical turning point, a catalyst of sorts for me. I decided at this point to leave Gvar’am because we also wanted to be more than a doctor and nurse -- to be positioned to play a broader role in social activism shaping the country and society. As already noted, it was my belief that a doctor should not be a member of the kibbutz; moreover, I never thought I was personally suitable in makeup to be a kibbutz member. In the interim, prior to my transfer to Beer Sheva taking effect, I exploited the break to participate in six-weeks in-service training at Kaplan’s Internal Medicine Department B, headed by Dr. Pinchas Efrati. 6 Efrati would provide remarkable learning experience opportunities at the patient’s bedside for his staff during doctor's rounds. He was the best pedagogical physician I ever encountered in the course of my medical education and specialization. In Beer Sheva I arrived in Beer Sheva. In those days, Beer Sheva was a desert wasteland -- the Old City and two immigrant clusters - the Aleph and the Gimmel Neighborhoods -- the Keren Cinema at the hub. I would judge that the population of the city in those days was in the vicinity of 7,000 residents. In 1949, a year after Beer Sheva was taken by Israeli forces, the military hospital in Be'er Sheva, which was established on the foundations of the British military hospital that operated in the city during the mandate, was transferred to the management of the Hadassah Medical Association which operated municipal-public hospitals in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa during the mandate. The hospital was named in memory of Dr. Haim Yaski. 7 Parallel to this, Clalit opened a clinic, under the management of Dr. Itzhak Shatal. 8 Within a short time the hospital doubled the number of its beds to 50. It was functioning in the old Turkish government buildings without running water and without electricity. The hardships demanded a solution. I was assigned to work in the Alef neighborhood clinic. The neighborhood was horribly overcrowded, and the patients were new immigrants from across the globe -- from Iraq and Morocco, from Egypt and Yemen, from Hungary and Romania and more -- almost every ethnic origin one could imagine. Three doctors worked in tandem at the clinic -- and we, too, as staff reflected the ‘ingathering of the exiles’: Dr. Gabriel Danon from Bulgaria, 9 Dr. Corry Boasson from Holland 10 and myself from Argentina. This was my first serious encounter dealing with health issues of new immigrants. Many of them didn’t understand Hebrew at all, and therefore I opened a course at the clinic to teach Hebrew to the patients after hours. For years I worked at this clinic, and afterwards moved to the Gimmel Neighborhood clinic. After our regular hours at the Beer Sheva clinic, in the evening we went out to work in Negev settlements due to the catastrophic shortage of doctors in the Negev. 6 Prof. Pinchas Efrati (1907-1988), born in Slovakia, studied medicine in Prague, and immigrated to Israel in 1933. He became a professor of internal medicine at the school of medicine in Jerusalem and director of Kaplan’s Internal Medicine Department B, among the first specialists in blood morphology in Israel. Levi, The Land of Israel’s Doctors. p. 119. 7 Dr. Haim Yassky (1896–1948) was born in Kishinev in Imperial Russia, studied medicine in Odessa and Geneva, and immigrated to Israel in 1919, serving as Hadassah’s director in Mandate Palestine between 1928-1948. He was murdered on 13 April,1948 in the ‘Doctors Convoy Massacre’ along with 77 others, when Palestinian Arabs attacked the medical convoy bringing supplies to Hadassah Hospital in the Mount Scopus enclave of Jerusalem. Levi, The Land of Israel’s Doctors, p. 265. 8 Dr. Itzhak Shatal, a physician of Dutch origin, was Clalit’s district medical director in Beer Sheva and the Negev from 1949. Tal, Hilah, Toldot Sherutei ha-Re’fua ba-Negev (History of Medical Services in the Negev), Ben- Gurion University of the Negev. 1993. pp. 91-106. (Henceforth, Tal) 9 Dr. Gabriel Danon (1921-2007) studied medicine in Sofia, Bulgaria, immigrated to Israel in 1949, worked as a family physician in the Aleph neighborhood of Beer Sheva and then in the 1960s in Ramat Gan. He served as a Clalit neighborhood medical administrator in the Ramat Yitzhak Neighborhood of Ramat Gan and died following a road accident in 2007. 10 Dr. Corry Hava Boasson, nee Mac Gillavry (1912-2009), was born in Holland, studied medicine in the Netherlands and in England, immigrating to Israel in 1939. She practiced medicine for a short period, then, afterwards turned to a career in medical librarianship in Jerusalem. Levi, The Land of Israel’s Doctors . p. 128; Tal

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