Dr. Kalman J. Mann, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, the largest medical complex in the Mideast, yesterday described the treatment of Arab refugees and terrorists at the Hadassah medical center. In an address before 2,000 delegates to the 55th annual convention of Hadassah, the woman’s Zionist organization of America, Dr. Mann related an incident of a would – be terrorist.
A 13-year-old Arab boy from Gaza tried to throw a hand grenade at a passing car, he said, but was a fraction too late and the grenade exploded in his hands. “Soon his blood group was determined and the few pints of that group that we had in store were pumped into his failing circulation,” Dr. Mann said. “He was rushed to the operating theater while Jewish civilians and soldiers volunteered their blood for this young emissary of death. Fifteen pints were administered, his ruptured spleen removed and his torn liver and punctured gut sown together,” he said. As the abdominal wounds healed, he continued the Arab was passed on to other surgeons for the repair of his hands and left eye.
Dr. Mann, 58, also cited the case of an East Jerusalem Arab man, a known hemophiliac, who was refused an operation in various European and Mideastern centers. Hemophiliacs can bleed to death because their blood lacks a clotting factor. The operation was performed at the Hadassah Medical Center, he said, where the patient was administered 450 doses of anti-hemophiliac globulin and many pints of fresh blood brought from all over Israel. “The patient received the equivalent of 500 pints of blood,” he said, “exhausting the supplies of the Hadassah medical center, a blood bank, and another hospital.” Dr. Mann questioned whether any other nation would have contributed so much to aid a “declared enemy” in the incident of the Arab boy or whether such patients anywhere in the world could receive better treatment.
Dr. Mann noted that of 75 open heart operations performed by the cardiac unit, 33 had been done on Arabs. Of a total load of 1,400 patients treated for cancer, 200 were Arab refugees referred to the center by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for refugees.
Dr. Christian Barnard, the South African heart surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant operation, received from Hadassah’s Mrs. Samuel Halprin, awards committee chairman, the Henrietta Szold award for distinguished contributions to medicine.
Joseph Klarman, world director of Youth Aliyah — the international child welfare movement which rescues Jewish children throughout the world, rehabilitates and educates them and settles them in Israel — told the parley that the greatest danger facing Jewish children in the Diaspora is assimilation. About 90 percent of Jewish children outside Israel, he said, receive only a general Jewish education and “absorb nothing of Jewish consciousness.”
ANNOUNCES PLANS TO ESTABLISH COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN ISRAEL
A community college that will serve both career oriented and university-bound students in a model educational system will be established in Israel, it was announced at the convention. Mrs. Benjamin Gottesman, national chairman of Hadassah’s Israel Education Services, also said that the organization’s two principle educational institutions, the Alice Seligsberg Comprehensive High School for girls and the Brandeis Vocational Training Center for boys, would also be combined into one high school.
The new high school and the proposed community college will provide comprehensive education from the seventh grade through two years of college and is intended to serve the Israeli Government as a “model” and “pilot program” in comprehensive education. The concept of the community college, Mrs. Gottesman said, will follow closely ideas of comprehensive education current “in the most advanced thinking about education in the United States.” The plan envisages the locally supported community college as the “backstop institution for a policy of a career for all.”
The proposed community college, Mrs. Gottesman said, will constitute a new urgently needed educational level in Israel because study in several technologies now can be undertaken only in a high school or university. The two-year community college may well be a chief means of approaching universal higher education in Israel as in the U.S., she added.
Besides an academic curriculum, Mrs. Gottesman said, the proposed college will offer courses of study in medical, chemical, biological, and industrial technology; accounting; electricity and electronics; construction; communication arts including advertising, commercial art, scientific photography and technical writing; rehabilitation therapy; and computer technology.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
