Aron Brand


Aron Brand-Auraban was an Israeli pediatric cardiologist. He served as chairman of the Israel Medical Association in Jerusalem, and founded the Jerusalem Academy of Medicine.

Biography

Aron Brand grew up in Koło, where he attended heder and the Jewish gymnasium. His father, Natan, was a grain merchant and miller. In 1925, his father, a fervent Zionist, sent him to Palestine to study at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. In 1928, he studied philosophy and Jewish studies in Berlin. He studied simultaneously at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. One of his classmates at the Hochschule was Abraham Joshua Heschel.
In 1935, Brand completed his doctoral thesis in the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin.
In the summer of 1939, Brand returned to Poland and married Esther Malka née Aurbach, of Przedecz. By a stroke of luck, they left Poland one day before the Nazis invaded. At the time, Brand was a teacher at the Ma'aleh School in Jerusalem. The couple had three sons, Avraham, Natan and Haim.

Medical career

In 1955, Brand founded the Jerusalem Academy of Medicine. From 1964 until his death, he headed the Pediatric Department of Bikur Cholim Hospital in Jerusalem. He was the founder of the Israel Institute for Medical History and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In 1969-1970, he was a visiting associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard College in Boston, Massachusetts.
Brand published numerous articles on medicine, philosophy, literature and art, and organized hundreds of lectures and workshops open to the general public on health-related issues. In 1976, he was awarded the Henrietta Szold Prize for his contribution to public health.

Commemoration

Rehov Aron Brand, a street in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem, is named after him.

Published works

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