$$News and Reports$$

Jan. 15, 2014
 


 

BGU’s Prof. Shimon Glick has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Awards for 2014. The award recognizes outstanding Anglo Olim – veteran and recent – who encapsulate the spirit of modern-day Zionism by contributing in a significant way towards the State of Israel.

More than 200 immigrants from English-speaking countries were nominated for the Bonei Zion Prize, which was awarded in five categories as well as for lifetime achievement. The recipients hailed originally from the United States. Each of the winners will receive a $10,000 prize at a ceremony soon in Jerusalem.

“We hope that accentuating the achievements of Anglo olim will serve as a catalyst to inspire others to make aliyah as well as highlight the achievements of these olim who are helping to make a difference to our homeland,” said Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, the executive director and a co-founder of Nefesh B’Nefesh, in a statement.

The panel of judges included retired Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, former chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces; Dr. David Breakstone, vice chairman of the World Zionist Organization; David Gerstein, a prominent painter and sculptor; Rabbi Berel Wein, founder and director of The Destiny Foundation; Yehuda Avner, an author and a former diplomat and prime ministerial adviser; and Barbara Goldstein, the deputy executive director of Hadassah in Israel.

Professor Emeritus Shimon Glick one of the founding members of the BGU Medical School (today the Joyce and Irving Goldman Medical School), well recalls the time immediately after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when “if you talked rationally, there was no realistic way you could set up a medical school. It was more of a dream than a reality,” he relates.

Back then Glick had been invited by the legendary medical educator Dr. Moshe Prywes to move from the U.S. to Israel to help set up the school. He left prestigious positions in New York as Chief of Medical Services at the Coney Island Hospital and Clinical Professor of Medicine at Downstate Medical Center, and moved to Beer-Sheva with his wife Brenda and six children. “We really started the school with nothing – a few crazy people. But Prywes was that kind of a dreamer, and we just went ahead,” muses Glick today.

Created under extremely adverse economic and psychological conditions, the School accepted its first students immediately after the Yom Kippur War. At the time, there was a small community hospital in Beer-Sheva. Kupat Holim, which owned the hospital, desperately wanted a medical school, as did Beer-Sheva Mayor David Tuviyahu. The other rationale for the school, explains Glick, was that Israeli physicians were not going out into the community. “Our idea was to build a medical school that was involved in the community, that improves the care in the community and that trains doctors to take care of people.”

Father of six, and at last count grandfather of 45 and great-grandfather to 23, Glick was born in New Jersey and trained in internal medicine at Yale University Medical Center and Mount Sinai Hospital. At BGU he became Chairman of the Division of Medicine, taking over the job of Dean and head of Health Services in the Negev region from 1986-1990. He currently is a member of the Lord Jakobovits Center for Jewish Medical Ethics.

Glick confesses that he and his colleagues had to make up the curriculum as they went along. But they were very clear about the innovations in medical training that they wanted to include, beginning with the revolutionary idea of “early clinical exposure.” Students met patients in the first week of medical school; before they had even cracked open a book. “The students don’t just treat patients. They talk to them and learn what it’s like to be sick,” says Glick. Another innovation was Prywes’ idea that students take their medical or Hippocratic oath when they begin their studies rather than when they finish.

The School also introduced an admission interview process. “The aim was also to see if someone was philosophically committed to the way we saw our mission: a person who cares about people, a mensch,” explains Glick. Glick also served for over a decade as ombudsman for Israel’s National Health Service. He has also been involved in numerous activities promoting medical ethics practice and teaching, both at the University and elsewhere. When he began studying medicine, he notes, medical ethics was not part of the curriculum. “It’s now a critical aspect of medicine. Issues come up every day, and students have to learn how to recognize an ethical problem and how to deal with it,” he says. “Our ideas have been introduced gradually in other medical schools. Imitation is the best form of flattery,” he concludes.