BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

CHAPTER 3

The History of Establishment of a School of Medicine in the Negev

First Strides towards Establishment of the Medical School The endeavor to establish a medical school in the Negev was born as part and parcel of the vision of settling the Negev as a whole. To understand this initiative, one needs to grasp the state of settlement in the Negev and in the State of Israel in general in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s. Ben-Gurion had gone to the Negev to set a personal example for Israeli youth after stepping down from office in 1963, and he retired from political life for good in 1970. Settling in Sde Boker, he called on Israeli youth -- particularly the offspring of established kibbutzim and moshavim -- to go down to the Negev to volunteer in immigrant communities in the Negev. Terrorist attacks were not foreign to life in the Negev at the time. Nonetheless, there were calls from public figures, the most outstanding being Moshe Dayan, who championed settling the Galilee and the Negev by spreading out the population which was heavily concentrated in the coastal plain in the center of the country between Hadera and Gedera and in major cities. From the time I arrived in the Negev, I argued that spreading out the population would not happen without spreading out institutions of higher learning and research. From my first days in the Negev, my perception of the grave shortage of doctors and its solution was tied to my dream of a medical school in Beer Sheva. The first mayor of Beer Sheva, David Tuviyahu, also had a vision of establishing a university in Beer Sheva. It is much to his credit that Ben Gurion University of the Negev became a reality. He was the person who in the first stage established the Institute for Higher Learning in the Negev, the seed from which Ben Gurion University (BGU) sprang forth and developed. To do so, he initiated convening a commission for establishing a university. It was comprised of professionals in the basic sciences, such as chemistry and physics, plus professionals in engineering, law, and medicine. I was a member of this commission, representing the medical discipline. From the start, the demand and the struggle to establish a medical school was intimately entwined in the struggle to establish the university. In November 1967, as a result of the demand to establish the university, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol established the Gillis Committee. He called on Prof. Yosef Gillis, an important scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, to head the Committee, which was mandated to investigate if there was justification for a university in Beer Sheva. As he was preparing to sum up the Committee’s deliberations, I went to Prof. Gillis’ home in Rechovot with my wife Neomi for dinner and told him: “All I’m asking is that you write that the conditions for establishing a medical school will be examined in the future.” I didn’t dare ask for more. The member of the Committee who supported my position was Prof. Andre de Vries from Beilinson Hospital, who had been one of the initiators behind establishment of the medical school at Tel Aviv University. In the end, with the submission of the Gillis Committee’s findings to the Prime Minister, we did succeed in sneaking in a sentence stating that the conditions for establishing a medical school in the future at the Central Hospital of the Negev and the Negev in general, would be examined.

At the same time, Prof. Yosef Stern, the director of the Central Hospital for the Negev, 28 Prof. Eliyahu Lehman, who had been head of the old Hadassah Hospital in Beer Sheva and was head

28 Prof. Yosef Stern (1913-1992) was born in Russia, studied medicine in Bologna, Italy, and immigrated to Israel in 1936. Beginning in 1950, he was an internist at Beilinson Hospital. Then, from 1959, with the establishment of the Central Hospital for the Negev in Beer Sheva, he was appointed the first director; and he continued in the role of director from 1972-1978 after the hospital had been renamed in memory of Moshe Soroka. At the same time, he headed the internal medicine department at Soroka Hospital and fathered the establishment of a school of nursing, physiotherapy and paramedical professions, which led Soroka Hospital to being the main teaching hospital for Ben- Gurion University.

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