To honor Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Galilee Medical Center will host the XIX Conference on Medicine and the Holocaust on May 15th.
The annual conference provides a unique perspective about medicine during the Holocaust, awareness of survivors’ medical needs and of their descendants, and strengthened commitment to the lessons of the Holocaust.
The conference will be held at the Engel Health Education Center at Galilee Medical Center and is scheduled annually to be close to the date that marks the end of World War II in Europe, May 8, 1945. This year, the Polish Ambassador to Israel, Marek Magierowski, will be the guest of honor. During the conference there will be a special exhibition of paintings by Bothaina Halabi, a Druze artist, that commemorate the Holocaust.
The annual Nahariya Conference on Medicine and the Holocaust is the only one in Israel that deals specifically with the various aspects of morbidity and medicine during and resulting from the Holocaust. Prof. Shaul Shasha, founder and head of the conference, and immediate past general director of Galilee Medical Center, will open the conference. Then remarks will be heard from current general director of the medical center, Dr. Masad Barhoum; the dean of the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, Bar-Ilan University in the Galilee, Prof. Karl Skorecki; Dr. Miriam Offer of the Western Galilee College, the Holocaust Studies Program; Polish Ambassador to Israel Marek Magierowski and Yigal Cohen, Director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.
Mr. Cohen will present a special award to Galilee Medical Center for its humanitarian medical care to about 3,000 Syrian casualties in their time of need during from 2013 – 2018, done in accordance with the decision of Israel’s government.
In addition, Prof. Avi Ury, an internationally recognized expert in rehabilitative medicine and chairman of the Helsinki Committee, will be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his pioneering and comprehensive contribution to the field of Holocaust and medical research in Israel and around the world. There will be three sessions: “Medical Aspects of Survivors and their Descendants,” “From Disease and Destruction to Growth in Israel,” and “War, Combatants and Ethics.”
Issues raised at previous Nahariya conferences have been used by the Dorner Committee, Israeli courts determine survivors’ claims, and by of the Ministry of Health which then made provisions for diagnosis and adequate compensation to survivors. As in the previous years, the conference hopes to give participants new and enlightening perspectives relating to medicine and the Holocaust.
The conference is in Hebrew and is open to the public.
