פרופ מוזס.jpg Professor Shimon Moses was born in Germany in 1926. His father, also a physician, was incarcerated by the Nazis in 1935. After his release in 1938, the family immigrated to Israel (then Mandatory Palestine) and settled in Jerusalem. Upon graduating high school in 1943, Moses joined the British army’s Jewish Brigade. After the conclusion of the Second World War, he studied science at the Hebrew University and then began medical school in Leiden, Netherlands. A year later he returned to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. At the end of the war in 1949, Professor Moses resumed his studies and was among the first graduating class of the Hebrew University’s medical school in 1952.  Following a residency in internal medicine, he chose to specialize in pediatrics and, in 1958, was among the founders of the Pediatrics Department at Kaplan Hospital in Rechovot.  In 1961, after a period of studies at Stanford University and research at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, Professor Moses was asked to establish a pediatrics department at Soroka Hospital (at the time called the Central Hospital for the Negev) in Beer Sheva.

At Soroka, Professor Moses researched metabolic diseases among children and was one of the pioneers of research on familial dysautonomia (FD or Riley–Day syndrome) in Israel, publishing 130 papers and co-authoring a book on this subject.  He headed the Pediatrics Department until 1990, when he was appointed the fourth Dean of the FOHS. 

During his tenure as Dean, a new wing for the hospital’s medical library was constructed and the plans for the new medical school campus named in memory of Joyce and Irving Goldman took shape. In addition, a campaign to absorb 50 immigrant doctors from the Soviet Union at Soroka Medical Center through a special assistance scheme was carried out successfully under his tutelage.

Professor Moses retired in 1994, and up until 2015, conducted medical research on Dead Sea climatotherapy.