Neurosurgery at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem

Henrietta Szold founded the Hadassah Women's Organization in the United States in 1912 to alleviate widespread disease and poverty in Jerusalem. In 1918, the Rothschild-Hadassah Hospital and the Hadassah School of Nursing opened in central Jerusalem. Chaim Weizmann and Albert Einstein, together with a small group of visionaries, founded the Hebrew University in 1923. After 1933, many physicians and scientists fled from Europe to Jerusalem, where they carried on their tradition of academic research at the university and Hadassah, and British military doctors joined medical rounds and lectures at Hadassah beginning in the 1930s. Young physicians who had graduated from European medical schools were trained in the subspecialties at Hadassah beginning in the 1940s, and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School enrolled its first class in 1949. These were the first academic institutions of their kind in Israel. The Department of Neurosurgery at Hadassah was established in 1941 under the leadership of Dr. Henry Wigderson, who was recruited from the United States. Dr. Aaron Beller became chairman in 1951, Dr. Mordechai Shalit became chairman in 1977, and Dr. Felix Umansky, the current chairman, was appointed in 1993. Today, more than 900 neurosurgical procedures spanning the spectrum of subspecialties and using state-of-the-art techniques and equipment are performed annually.