Miriam Adelson


Miriam Adelson is an Israeli American philanthropist and doctor. She married American business magnate Sheldon Adelson in 1991, and has since become a prominent Republican Party donor. She is the current publisher of the newspaper Israel Hayom. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson were presented with the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the Smithsonian Institution in 2008. In 2013, she received honorary citizenship of Jerusalem. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.

Life and work

Adelson was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine in 1945, to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust. Her father was a prominent member of the Mapam political party. In the 1950s, her family settled in the city of Haifa, where Adelson's father owned and operated several movie theaters. She attended the Hebrew Reali School for 12 years. She served mandatory army service as a medical officer at Ness Ziona. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a medical degree from Tel Aviv University's Sackler Medical School, she went on to become the chief internist in an emergency room at Tel Aviv's Rokach Hospital. Adelson then married Ariel Ochshorn, a physician, with whom she had two children.
Adelson divorced Ochshorn in the 1980s, and in 1986 she went to Rockefeller University on an exchange program, specializing in drug addiction. She was mentored by and collaborated with Mary Jeanne Kreek. While at Rockefeller, she met Sheldon Adelson, whom she married in 1991. In 1993, she founded a substance abuse center and research clinic there, and in 2000, the couple opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in Las Vegas. A strong supporter of Israel, she admitted her heart has always been in that country and that she got "stuck" in America after meeting her husband, is credited with influencing Sheldon's political views on Israel, and served as one of the 'finance vice-chairs' for the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Honors and awards

Honors