BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

Even prior to my appointment as director-general of Clalit, Moshe Soroka engaged De Vries in negotiations for a department director slot at Beilinson. De Vries established the Felsenstein Medical Research Center, located on the Beilinson campus, as part of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Tel Aviv University. After Prof. Servadio’s resignation as Beilinson’s director, I thought Prof. De Vries would be a suitable replacement to raise the academic standard and research operations at Beilinson. He was no longer rector or dean at Tel Aviv University. I embarked on negotiations with him even though there were people who warned me that I was inviting trouble for myself with such an appointment. They argued that De Vries wouldn’t bend to any superior authority and wouldn’t go in the direction that I, as director-general, envisioned for Clalit. The fact is, I never feared strong-willed individuals with such a makeup. I felt that if the appointment itself was objectively a good fit, De Vries would be good for me as well. There were prior examples where this assumption on my part had worked: I had a special weakness for hiring pensioners of high merit. For example, after his retirement, I hired Prof. Moshe Rachmilevich to serve as a mentor for senior physicians at Beilinson. He had been the top figure at the school of medicine in Jerusalem, where he had directed the internal medicine department, Likewise, Prof. Baruch Padeh had been director at the Sheba Medical Center and director-general of the Ministry of Health while I had been a “Clalit man.” Despite all the problems and conflicts between the two institutions, we worked in full cooperation with one another. We were each fully aware of the other’s position, and had a working relationship that was also very warm and enabled us to work together to do much to advance the country’s health needs. One previously cited example of this was our joint efforts to free up beds for war causalities during the Yom Kippur War. After Prof. Padeh retired and went to live in the town of Katrzrin on the Golan Heights, I employed him to run Clalit clinics in Kiryat Shmona and Hazor in the Upper Galilee. There, he contributed his expertise on diabetes, geriatrics, and internal medicine. Once a week, he also went to Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv where the served as a hematologist at the hospital’s laboratory. To return to Prof. De Vries, despite the warnings that his appointment was a recipe for problems, I appointed him, and everything went well. De Vries had a private “hobby” parallel to his official duties at Beilinson -- to mentor Arab doctors in Nazareth. He viewed such efforts for professionalization and integration in society as a very important mission. After a period, De Vries resigned from the post of hospital director at Beilinson, but we remained friends for years. Schneider Children’s Medical Center For many years the physical plant at Beilinson Hospital’s pediatrics department was well below par. Moshe Soroka prepared a modest plan to establish a new department but he didn’t live to see his plan implemented. Years later, due to drastic curtailments in development budgets, many hospitals in Israel began fundraising in the United States. I decided to embark on mobilizing funding independently in the United States and to carry out this mission, I established a special non-profit in New York, the MEREFDI. 81 I had heard about Irving Schneider 82 who was the co-chairman of a large real estate firm in New York, and for whom the Schneider Children’s Hospital in Long Island, New York was named. I found out that he had a legal advisor named Arnold Foster, an ardent Zionist who visited Israel twice a year; and I requested to meet him. It turned out, when I met Foster, that he was 81 More on this subject is in the chapter on the National Health Insurance Law (Chapter 9). 82 Irving Schneider (1919-2012), born in Brooklyn, New York, studied at City College of New York, and made his fortune in real estate in New York. He became a renowned American Jewish philanthropist. He supported institutions such as Brandeis and Long Island University, and countless Jewish objectives in New York. He was the founder and donor of Clalit’s Schneider Center for Pediatrics in Petach Tikva, which is adjacent to the Beilinson Medical Center. His close ties with Israel were also reflected in other philanthropic investments. His two daughters continue his legacy and closely follow the operations of the Schneider Children’s Hospital.

54