BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

his ideology, outlined above, was what led to this ethos, a school with a holistic outlook and community- centered view.

From this point onward, we became partners in the struggle to establish a medical school. Prof. Prywes would be the candidate for the deanship. He knew that the objection in Jerusalem to establish a medical school in Beer Sheva was partly philosophic difference about the objective of medical education and partly personal. To this day, the Minister of Education in Israel serves as chair of the Council for Higher Education, and the Council considers and votes upon whether new schools should be created. When the Council is tied, the Minister of Education, as its chair, has the deciding vote. At the time, the Minister of Education was Yigal Allon, a former general in the Israeli Army who later became prime minister. With respect to creating a medical school in Beer Sheva, Allon was between a rock and a hard place. He was unsure whether he could get the government’s budget to underwrite establishment of a medical school in Beer Sheva, and he didn’t know whether conditions were finally ripe for founding such a school. So, he appointed an investigatory committee headed by Prof. Michael Feldman, one of the Weizmann Institute’s most outstanding scientists. Members of the Feldman Committee were mandated to take the Prywes Plan that we had adopted and give their opinion of it. I submitted to the committee statistics on the shortage of doctors, the need for doctors in frontier areas, and so forth. At the head of the opposition stood Prof. Aharon Beller, the dean of the medical school in Jerusalem. At the time there was, and still is, an Israeli Association of Medical Deans, whose head is rotated among the deans of the various schools. In this period of time, Prof. Beller was the chair, and he sent the harshest of letters in the Association’s name against establishment of a medical school in Beer Sheva. Prof. Gitter, who was dean of the medical school in Tel Aviv and head of the physiology institute at Beilinson Hospital, tried to soften Beller’s strident opposition, but with little success. In parallel to this, there were annual discussions between the Ministry of Finance and Clalit over possible governmental participation in Clalit’s budget. The meeting took place at Clalit’s Arza rest and recuperation facility in the Jerusalem foothills. The Ministry of Finance’s director general forewarned us: “You should be aware that if you establish a school of medicine in Beer Sheva de facto, without government approval, we will cancel all proposals for governmental participation in the sick fund’s budget.” Despite this threat, a short time afterward, I convened at my home in Beer Sheva a meeting with four participants in attendance: David Tuviyahu, Prof. Moshe Prywes, Moshe Soroka, and myself. It was there that we signed the first agreement between the Institute of Higher Education in the Negev and Clalit – that we were establishing a school of medicine in Beer Sheva. It was a document that was undeniably historic – a tipping point. The Feldman Report took a positive position vis-à-vis the Prywes Plan. The report was submitted to the Council of Higher Education with Minister of Education Yigal Allon chairing. The central opposition was of the Hebrew University’s delegation. The first to take the floor was archeologist Prof. Yigal Yadin, who spoke in harsh terms against establishing a medical school in Beer Sheva. Prof. Avraham Harman, president of the Hebrew University told Prywes in a private conversation: “It’s not going to happen.” The vote closed with half in favor and half against establishment of a medical school. Minister of Education Yigal Allon, as chair of the Council, had to cast the deciding vote. He decided to vote in favor of the medical school in Beer Sheva. 39 39 Doron H., Shvarts S., "Academia, politics and health: the struggle for the establishment of a school of medicine in Beer Sheva", in Sustaining Change in Medical education (Benor, D.E., editor) Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, Beer Sheva, 2005, p.60 Doron H., Shvarts S., "The Process of the Establishment of a School of Medicine in Beer Sheva,” in Ben Gurion University Book (Grados Y., editor), 2014.

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