Alon Pinkas, Israeli consul
general, and Nat Hentoff,
biographer of Cardinal O’Connor |
ASSAF HAROFEH
MEDICAL CENTER
Story Of
Unwanted Baby
Is Doctor’s Triumph
By Tim Boxer
 S
chief of neonatology at Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Zerifin, Israel,
Michael Goldberg’s stock in trade is babies. At a
cocktail party at the New York home of Israeli Consul General Alon
Pinkas, Dr. Goldberg told the story of one baby born with
severe defects in the lower part of the body.
“His abdomen was
missing,” Goldberg said. “You could see the bladder, the urine
running into the bladder, and the structural defect of the penis.”
He told the parents that
an emergency operation must be done immediately.
They couldn’t cope with
it.
“We are going home,”
they said. They left the hospital, empty-handed.
Goldberg and his staff
named the baby Oded and went to work to save his life. They
performed operation after operation.
“The little abandoned
baby grew up in my department,” Goldberg said. “He had
hundreds of aunts and uncles in the hospital.”
In a year another family
came along and adopted the child. After a while Goldberg lost
contact.
Last fall, 20 years
later, the doctor got a call: “This is Oded.”
For a moment Goldberg was
speechless. He arranged to meet the next day.
“Coming towards me was
this tall erect man, head held high, in uniform. He was a member
of an elite fighting unit. Again I was speechless. We both cried.”
The story of Oded,
Goldberg added, is one of the highlights of his career.
Today Goldberg has added
another responsibility to his specialty of taking care of newborn
children.
“Every mother who goes
home with her baby,” he said, “we give her a baby survival
kit. This is a plastic tent with long zippers along the side, and
its own air pump to filter out noxious agents.
“What has become normal
in Israel is not normal in the rest of the world. This is life for
us in Israel.”
Goldberg also said that
American Friends of Assaf Harofeh Medical Center is funding a new
building, to be named for New York’s late John Cardinal O’Connor,
that “will treat babies who are brain damaged, with major
congenital defects, and babies who’ve had their arms and legs
blown away by terrorists.”
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