Hadassah Hospital for the Negev

The story

The Hadassah Hospital for the Negev named after Dr. Haim Yassky operated in Beersheba from 1949 to 1960, in a compound in the Old City. In the First World War a clinic of the Turkish and German army stood at the place, which operated in several buildings; after the British entered the city the clinic went on serving the inhabitants of the town, in the Second World War it served as a British military clinic, and after the IDF entered Beersheba in October 1948 it served as a military hospital. A short time afterwards the government of Israel approached the Hadassah Medical Organization with a request that it establish a hospital in the city, and the organization's director general Dr. Eli Davis worked for its establishment. The institution arose on the site of the military hospital, which transferred to it all of its contents, and the blocking of the passages between the buildings with bricks created a single compound with a courtyard, trees and a small hexagonal water pool. The hospital began to operate on 19 December 1949 and was dedicated in a ceremony on 13 April 1950, and was named after Dr. Haim Yassky, director of the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, who was killed in the attack on the Hadassah convoy in April 1948. At its opening it had 48 beds, an emergency room, an operating room, a delivery room and an X-ray institute, and its staff numbered four physicians and 17 nurses. In 1952 it had 100 beds and in 1955 one hundred and twenty, and about two hundred children were born in it each month. Over the course of its years 150 thousand people were treated in it and 15 thousand children were born in it. The population of the city and of the Negev grew faster than it did: in 1952 there were 14,500 residents living in Beersheba, and at the end of the decade the city and the Negev numbered 150 thousand. In 1959 the central hospital that took its place opened.

• Ottoman
• 1917
• 1948
• People
• Health
• Beersheba