Mary Sylvia Gordon, MD M.B.B.S.

JewishGen Lithuanian Births
GORDON, Sara Mera father Movsha Matys, grandfather Leizer mother Pesa
Date of birth 12/8/1889 Hebrew date 27 Av Telsiai Telsiai Kaunas Comment Town-dweller, Family from Svencionys Telsiai 1889F38 Microfilm 2288214 / 2 LVIA/1226/1/1318

From http://www.telfed.org.il/pdf%20files/oct1-23.pdf (no year given) A WARRIOR WITH A STETHOSCOPE

Dr. Mary Gordon never stoped fighting

So who was Mary Gordon who had left such a lasting legacy and has a unit at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon named after her?

“Where and how can I best serve?” must always have preyed on the mind of Dr.Mary Gordon. She never took the easy path and wherever the needs were most pressing, this remarkable woman was in the thick of it. In the 1922 Witwatersrand Miners’ Strike, the Superintendent of the Johannesburg General Hospital called for volunteers to help the wounded and dying on the streets in Fordsburg, which had become a battleground. Only two people volunteered and 32-year-old Mary Gordon was the first to step forward. Risking life and limb she bravely dodged bullets to reach the besieged miners.

Mary would go on to be the first woman doctor at the Johannesburg General Hospital where she served for thirty years. As she had previously served during the Great War in military hospitals in England, it was only natural that during the Second World War she would again enlist. Attaining the rank of major she served as a consultant physician.

After the Second World War, Mary resigned from the Johannesburg General Hospital, Wits University Medical School, turned her back on a lucrative private practice and left for Palestine on October 19, 1946.

OFF TO CYPRUS

First stop for Mary was the refugee camp in Cyprus, which had a population of some 30,000 by the time she arrived. The financial responsibility for the welfare of these “illegal immigrants” from war-torn Europe rested with the Jews worldwide through the American Jewish institution, known as the ‘Joint’. Mary who was appointed Administrator of the Jewish Wing of the British Military Hospital became the main communication link between the Joint and the British.

Fondly known as “Mother Mary”, she immersed herself in her work with people whose lives had been shattered by war and persecution, and whose dreams for a better future were being denied by an uncaring Mandate authoriity. She was often heard to remark, “One can measure temperature, but one cannot measure pain - physical or mental.”

When the Arab states attacked the new State following the declaration of Independence, the Jewish nurses asked to be relieved of their duties so they could go home. “Not yet,” Mary told them, “Your duty to your people begins in this hospital.” While she would soften this position over the ensuing months, Mary stayed at her post until her work was complete and the remaining patients in the hospital were all transferred to Israel.

During the War of Independence, Mary served as Consultant Physician to the new Israeli army, but her finest hour was still to come. It arrived with the thousands of Jewish refugees from Yemen brought over in Operation Magic Carpet during 1949-1950.

TENT CITY

As they came off the planes, the Yemenites were transported to an abandoned British military base in Rosh Ha’Ayin. The conditions were primitive and disease was rife. There were only a few barracks and they were used mainly for administration and health services. The living quarters for the new immigrants were tents, rows and rows of tents. “A tent city,” as many described it at the time.

Neil Schwartz, a cardiologist and a member of Telfed’s Media Committee, recalls as a young student of eighteen meetiing Mary at her clinic in Rosh Ha’Ayin. “It was 1950 and I had come to Israel on a Habonim leadership course from Johannesburg. Through a friend of my late mother’s in Tel Aviv, we visited the camp and what I can only describe, as a place of mud and misery. It was December; the rains had been hard and it was freezing cold. And here was this remarkable woman, who had been at the pinnacle of her profession in Johannesburg, knee deep in mud. She showed us her Mother and Child clinic, a pioneer creation of Tipat Halav.”

Mary’s legacy to the early life of Rosh Ha’Ayin received a reminder with the endowment created for the Miftan Maayanot. Nephew Gordon Mandelzweig of Omer explains the background to the endowment: “This Miftan was originally sponsored by my aunt during her service at the Yemenite Ma’abarot. The purpose of the Miftan was to train young immiggrants in useful trades. Today it serves the same purpose, but for youth at risk.” The first award was made at a graduation ceremony at the Miftan this past June in the preseence of members of the family and old associates - Sam Levin, Prof. George Mundel and Ruth Stern (Saretsky).

Mary returned to South Africa in 1958 to look after her mother and ill sister and devoted the rest of her life to the treatment of African children.

Neil Schwartz’s association with Mary would again connect many years after he first met her in the cold winter of 1950 but well after her passing in South Africa. “A wealthy philanthroppist, Freda Lawenski, had bequeathed a generous sum of money for a paediaatric unit in Israel in the name of Mary Gordon,” recalls Schwartz.

“Her nephew, Jack Metz, a hemattologist and Head of the SA Institute of Medical Research came to Israel with two contenders for the bequest, one of which was Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon. Jack was a good friend of mine and I pressed him to go for Barzilai. “ In keeping with Mary’s personaliity, I felt that she would have preferred the money to go to a hospital that was still establishing itself.”

The money from South Africa was channelled through Telfed, which remains strongly associated with Barzilai Hospital.

“Mary had a deep feeling for her people,” recalled Nurse Friedman, who served with Mary in Cyprus “The Jewish people were her life.

Her private life was incidental. She never asked for anything, she always gave. She was beyond considerations of status and prestige.”

Prof. Jack Metz, Sim Manor, Basil Katz and Gordon Mandelzweig recently established an endowment fund, in memory of their aunt, the renowned Dr. Mary Gordon, in order to present an annual prize to the best all-round student graduating from the Miftan Maayanot in Rosh Ha’Ayin.

Listed in South African Jewish "Who's Who" book: 1929's The South African Jewish Year Book: Directory of Jewish Organizations and Who's Who in South African Jewry 1929, 5689-90

GORDON, Mary S., Medical Practitioner, M.B., B.S. Born in Russia in 1890. Educated at Argyle House, Sunderland and University of Durham. Came to South Africa in 1917. Hon. Medical Registrar, Johannesburg Hospital; M.O., Education Department, Transvaal. Postal address: Adderley House, Johannesburg.

From http://www.aimhigher.ac.uk/press_release.cfm?pid=16191

Jewish women's contribution to Welfare State unearthed

Tuesday 15th May 2007

The University of Manchester

A University of Manchester historian has unearthed the forgotten contribution of hundreds of orthodox Jewish women to the creation of the welfare state.

Dr Yaakov Wise used a combination of interviews with members of the Jewish community and historical records to reveal the involvement of the women to British society.

[some text removed]

The Honorary Research Fellow at the University's Centre for Jewish Studies said: "This research explodes the myth that Orthodox Jewish women are happy to maintain a low profile behind their husbands, fathers and sons.

"And it also disproves the lie that the Jewish community is insular with no or little interest in wider British society.

"Following the emancipation of Middle Class women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, many women became politicised and contributed greatly to the public good.

"But what isn't as well known is that Jewish women were also part of this process.

"There were even Jewish suffragettes and members of special female trades unions such as the Women's Garment and Tailoring Union."

He added: "There are dozens of examples: one was Henrietta (Nettie) Adler the elder daughter of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler.

"Nettie was a social reformer campaigning to end child labour and one of the first two women members of the London County Council.

"Another was Dr Mary Gordon, granddaughter of a famous communal rabbi from Lithuania, Eliezer Gordon.

"Mary was one of the first Jewish women to qualify as a GP and worked in England - including as medical officer of Holloway Prison, South Africa, the Cyprus Jewish internment camp and Israel. [remainder removed]

From http://machal.org.il/

It was written in the stars that Mary Gordon, making a priestly vocation of the practice of medicine, would become the doctor in overall charge of the Jewish wing of the British Military Hospital in Nicosia, in the fateful 1947/1948 period. This woman, brusque outside, flame-lit inside, was born to serve.

In 1922 during the bitter miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand, General Dr. MacKenzie, Superintendent of the Johannesburg General Hospital convened a meeting on humanitarian grounds calling for volunteers to render medical aid to the wounded and dying of the besieged miners in Fordsburg. Dr. Gordon, then 32, stepped forward immediately. There was only one other volunteer, Dr. Bensusan, also Jewish. Under cover of the Red Cross, both reached the miners' lines safely and worked unremittingly among them.

Mary Gordon served the Johannesburg General Hospital for thirty years. She was its first woman doctor and the first woman on its honorary staff. She became physician in charge of wards. Later she acted as senior physician, doing part-time and honorary work. She lectured at the Medical School, first in anesthetics and later in clinical medicine. A generation of doctors passed through her hands. In 1939 she was planning to leave for Palestine when World War II broke out. The South African war authorities would not release her. War’s end found her a major at Roberts Heights, Pretoria, a consultant physician. She told the army she would stay on if it would send her up north (military hospitals were still there). Palestine was in her mind. There she set foot in 1946, wearing the not fondly regarded British uniform. The Stern group hounded her.

Unable to secure an immigration certificate, she returned to South Africa in August 1946 after a stay of only three months.

But nothing could stop this determined woman. She quit the South African Army, resigned from all her employment at the Johannesburg General, the University and the Transvaal Education Department, turned her back on what was possibly the largest private practice in Johannesburg and left for Palestine on October 18, 1946, as a “temporary laborer with WIZO” as her passport had it. As such, she had periodically to get her visa extended.

She was back to the austere living of her youth. There were nine camps for the refugees in Cyprus. The camp population increased or decreased according to various accidental circumstances. For example, British naval patrols captured three refugee ships in February 1948 and the population went up by 1,648. On the other hand, 5,386 were allowed to leave under a new special infants and youth quota. This was exceptional. The regular monthly quota of Palestine certificates was 750.

When Dr. Gordon arrived in Cyprus shortly after the partition decision, the total camp population was 30,000. Financial responsibility for its welfare was borne by the Jews of the world through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or Joint).

A section of the British Military Hospital in Nicosia was given over to the Joint and became the Jewish wing. There were three wards: medical, surgical, and maternity, part of a complex of buildings in large grounds, with the Jewish wing put behind barbed wire and with a separate gate and pass system Dr. Gordon became the main communication link between the Joint and the British.

What was thenceforth played out in that setting was that not uncommon aspect of war, in which medicine operates on its own superior level, remote from the abrasions and poisons of political conflict. Jewish doctors and nurses took over from the British in the medical and maternity wards, but British surgeons continued to work in the surgical ward.

Dr. Gordon and Tova Friedman, an Israeli nurse close to the South Africans, found Palestine and Cyprus two different worlds. In Palestine, the British were the imposers of curfews and the tough searchers at roadblocks. In Cyprus hospital, they were friendly and considerate, from surgeon to orderly to sentry at the gate. There were fraternal evenings between British personnel and the patients, celebration of birthday parties and friendships. The case that particularly imprinted itself on the minds of the two women was that of a refugee with a bad skin disease, a rare kind of disease for which a special medicine had become available. The treatment required that every four hours, day and at night, the patient should be stripped of the bandages all over his body for new bandages. A British staffer working in the laboratory made this his special duty, giving the task an uncommon conscientiousness, and the patient an uncommon devotion.

Dr. Gordon was more than a doctor. She was the shade of a Banyan tree. Her patients were not ordinary patients but people whose lives had been cataclysmic. Their great need was a fount of compassion, an ear open to listening, a confidante with “a soul.” Mary Gordon became Mother Mary.