NEW YORK, Feb. 20 (JTA) — Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef’s trip to New York was supposed to happen six week ago, but then disaster struck: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered his second stroke and went into a coma. “I took it upon myself to be spokesman of the hospital” because “I thought it’s very delicate and a huge responsibility, and thought it should be handled by a doctor and not by a professional in PR or press department,” Mor-Yosef, the director general of Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, told JTA in an interview on Feb. 16. And handle it delicately he did. Everything was cleared first with the family, and a strategy was decided upon from the beginning. “It’s a problem, an ethical problem, how much you can disclose, how much you can say about a patient who is also the prime minister,” Mor-Yosef says. “But we agreed after the first hospitalization what we’d say. We consulted with the sons and took the decision to give only data without any evaluation and leave the evaluation to the journalists, to the doctors from other hospitals.” Mor-Yosef cuts a tall, trim figure. His thatch of gray hair is well-groomed, but his expression is tired. And for good reason: Mor-Yosef arrived in New York on the morning of Feb. 16 from Israel, and had been in meetings with New York staff members, donors and fund-raisers from Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, as well as reporters. The next day, he was slated to fly to Florida for further meetings. Despite his hectic schedule, he remains pleasant and unruffled during the interview. He speaks carefully, choosing words without hesitation but precisely, much like the press reports he has been delivering since he was suddenly placed in the spotlight following Sharon’s second stroke. Mor-Yosef has been the hospital’s director for five years, and worked in medical administration for 15. He practiced as an obstetrician and gynecologist in Israel. He studied medicine at Hadassah, then earned a master’s at Harvard in Public Administration. His English is lightly accented, but fluid and graceful. He switched from treating patients to administration by request from the Hadassah Hospital, he says. “It came as a surprise, but I tried it for three years and found it very interesting and my input is more substantial, more meaningful.” Though his role has expanded to become so public over the past weeks, he downplays it, shifting focus to the hospital. “Hadassah got huge exposure, the hospital got huge exposure, we had journalists, reporters, TV crews, radio crews for a week, day and night in the hospital, and they broadcast from there.” He also dryly remarks that “we are not a hospital for one person. We have 1,100 beds and we treat 1,000,000 patients” annually, citing an occupancy rate this winter of 106 percent. Humor aside, Mor-Yosef acknowledges that Sharon’s illness affects Israelis both inside and outside the hospital. “Of course, it is emotional to every one of us” at the hospital, he says, and he understands that it is also the case with the public. “I don’t know any Israeli, anyone around the world who doesn’t pray for his recovery,” he says. In the United States, Mor-Yosef is speaking to donors about the hospital’s various plans. He presses no particular one, saying that “usually the donors choose their projects.” In the works right now is a three-floor addition to the hospital’s mother-child unit; a hotel for patients’ religious relatives who cannot walk to the hospital on Shabbat and holidays; and a research and technology incubator. Mor-Yosef’s favorite project is a new building on the campus, in planning since 2003. He hopes to begin construction in 2007, and have it completed in 2012, in time for the hospital’s 100th anniversary. His old-school gentleman demeanor does not crack when the possibility of ending Sharon’s life is broached, but he is quietly and calmly adamant. “First of all, he’s not under any life-support machines. In order to stop his life you have to kill him. Not to disconnect him from a machine. And no one is expecting us to kill him — as a patient, not as the prime minister. Secondly, it’s a family issue. We are not in this stage at all. We think we have to fight for his life and recovery, and the family thinks it. “And of course I’m aware of people who think that maybe it’s better for him to die than to live but it’s not our attitude. It’s like ‘why are you doing so much to him?’ But what we are doing is standard treatment” for this kind of patient, he says. A prognosis is difficult, he says. “The main problem with brain recovery is that we don’t know exactly the mystery of the brain, and no one can say if, when and to which level he’ll be with us. It’s something that is beyond the medical profession’s abilities to focus the future in this specific case. But we all know that there is a chance that he will recover, and this is what we fight for.”
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