Ma’agan Community Support Center for Cancer Patients and their Families in Beer-Sheva was renamed Edy’s House on Wednesday morning in memory of founder Edy Freedman, who passed away in January. The naming took place in the presence of her husband Sol Freedman. The event was timed to coincide with the 41st annual Board of Governors Meeting as both Sol and Edy were long-time supporters and board members of BGU. Edy was also a former national board member of AABGU. She and Sol gave to many projects in the US and Israel, but according to Sol, she always maintained that Ma’agan was one of those closest to her heart.
Established in 2000 with the aim of providing social and emotional support to people with cancer, together with their families and friends, as a supplement to conventional medicine, Ma'agan offers emotional support and networking groups, lectures, workshops and social events in a warm, home-like setting for patients and family members. All of their programs and services are available free of charge. No such program previously existed in Israel where the growing incidence of cancer, especially among young people and new immigrants, generated an urgent need for auxiliary care. The Center, with 400 registered patients and their families, welcomes all in need.
Prof. Miriam Cohen spoke movingly about how Ma'agan helped her and her family through her most difficult period when battling advanced kidney cancer six years ago. She had first met and become friends with the Freedmans when she was a new Dean in1990. "I heard from them about Ma'agan, but to be absolutely frank with you I thought – with the arrogance of a healthy person – that it really had very little to do with me, until it had everything to do with me." She described Ma'agan as, "a wondrous place in which we have all had some peaceful moments and solace for our shattered souls and bodies" and in the name of "all of the members of the alarmingly growing group of comrades in arms fighting the great wars of our lives; we salute Edy, our hero."
"Over the years, Ma'agan has become a crucial community resource important to the Negev population that enjoys this service, which in many parts of the country does not exist," explained Faculty of Health Sciences head of the Department of Family Medicine and the Division of Community Health and Chairman of Ma’agan Prof. Pesach Shvartzman.
The Ma’agan Center is an integral part of the Faculty of Health Sciences of BGU. Sol Freedman said at the dedication ceremony, “Two weeks after my wife passed away, a friend who is also a social worker asked: ‘How are your daughters? Have you heard from them?’” “I replied: ‘Our daughters called.’ Then I paused and said, ‘I guess I should say my daughters now.’ To which my friend, putting her hand on my shoulder, said: ‘She is with you in your heart. I think you can continue to say ‘our daughters.’”
“Every one of you who walk through the doors of Edy’s House, she will be with you, whether you are parents or children, Jews or Arabs or Russians or Ethiopians, until there is no more cancer,” he declared. Edy Freedman once described the rationale behind the center, "If you meet inside a hospital, you're sick. If you meet in the community, you're learning to live with an illness." "This is a disease that doesn't choose where it strikes," she added, "It's a family disease, and no one should have to deal with it alone."
Above: Sol Freedman
Above from left to right: Mayor of Beer-Sheva Ruvik Danilovich, Former Mayor of Beer-Sheva Ya'akov Terner, BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi, Sol Freedman, Director of the Department of BGU's Family Medicine and the Division of Community Health and Chairman of Ma’agan Prof. Pesach Shvartzman, Aviva Segev, Director-General of the Israel Cancer Association Miri Ziv
