A garden was dedicated today at the base of the new Hadassah Hospital building on Mt. Scopus in memory of Dr. Chaim Yassky, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization, and 76 of his workers who were ambushed and killed by Arabs on the road to Mt. Scopus in April, 1948, a month before Israel declared its independence.
Among the hundreds gathered before the new hospital building, which was formally dedicated yesterday, were Israel’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Mordechai Gur, who led the paratrooper assault that captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War; Prof. Moshe Rachmilewitz, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University School of Medicine who recalled the mere chance that prevented his joining the doomed convoy 27 years ago; and Mrs. Rose L. Halprin, past president of Hadassah who recalled the late Dr. Yassky as “one who envisioned on this hill a house of medicine whose purpose and beauty would match the historic site.”
REMEMBERING THOSE WHO DIED
Mrs. Faye Schenk, president of the Hadassah Medical Organization and chairman of the American Zionist Federation, presided at the memorial dedication, “From atop Mt. Scopus, we greet you Jerusalem,” she declared. “Even as we rejoice in our return and dedication of this center of healing, we harken to the imperative of remember…the stalwarts who in the convoy on their way to these ancient hills were felled by the enemy’s hand.”
Prof. Rachmilewitz, one of the leading physicians of the Hadassah Medical Organization, recalled that in April, 1948 he had planned to be in the convoy going up to Mt. Scopus but didn’t join it at the last minute because the late Dr. Judah Magnes, then Chancellor of the Hebrew University, asked him to stay in Jerusalem for the day in order to give him a medical check-up before Dr. Magnes left on a trip to the U.S.
Gur, looking toward the Judaean desert extending east of the Mt. Scopus ridge to the Dead Sea, praised Hadassah for rebuilding its hospital on the old site. He called the new facility a combination of physical health and spiritual revival “Only such a combination can change the area to the east of the mountain to become a new center of life and development,” he said.
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