Visionaries from LVIV: The Story of a Jewish Hospital - Hardcover

by Ewa Herbst (Editor), Ewa Herbst (Contribution by), Anna Jakimyszyn-Gadocha (Contribution by)

Year 2023 marked 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv (Lw?w/Lemberg). This richly illustrated book is a tribute to its place in the once-vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. Visionaries from Lviv presents the hospital's history and its fascinating architecture, its doctors, and its founder, a prominent local Jewish philanthropist Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Lviv.

The volume also details the history of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia prior to the hospital's founding, Jewish access to the medical profession, and the impact of Jewish doctors on the path to modernity. It also shows the struggle of women to become doctors. A moving and timely book with contributions from leading historians, scholars, and medical professionals, Visionaries from Lviv is an ode to the once thriving Jewish community in Lviv and a testament to how one person's dream and commitment can impact the lives of so many.

This publication was made possible with support from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Gesher Galicia.

Author Biography

Ewa Herbst, Ph.D. is a great-granddaughter of Maurycy Lazarus, the founder of the Jewish Hospital in Lviv and the editor of this book. She is an electrical and biomedical engineer, former visiting professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, and at Tulane University in New Orleans, principal research engineer at a biomedical instrument company, and a CEO of her own research and development company. In addition to publications in her area of research and several patents, she is the author of the book Dokument podróży (Travel Document), a story in poems and prose of her emotional roller coaster after being forced out of her country as a result of the antisemitic wave of 1968-69 in Poland. She is also the author of "Herman Diamand on the 90th anniversary of his death", about one of the leading Galician and Polish politicians and her great-uncle, to be published in the Jewish History Quarterly in September 2023.

Anna Jakimyszyn-Gadocha, Ph.D. is a historian and a specialist in Judaic studies at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She is the scientific editor of this book and the author of: Żydzi krakowscy w dobie Rzeczypospolitej Krakowskiej. Status prawny. Przeobrażenia gminy. System edukacyjny (Krakow-Budapeszt 2008), Mykwa. Dzieje żydowskiej laźni rytualnej przy ul. Szerokiej w Krakowie (Krakow-Budapeszt 2012), Yiddish-English-Polish Dictionary (Krakow 2016), W trosce o zdrowie żydowskiej spoleczności Lwowa (1918-1939) (Krakow-Budapeszt-Syrakuzy 2021) and numerous articles. She translated Statut krakowskiej gminy żydowskiej z 1595 roku i jego uzupelnienia (Krakow 2005). She is the co-editor of דפולין ממרא Mamre de-Polin. Księga jubileuszowa dedykowana Profesorowi Edwardowi Dąbrowie (Krakow-Budapeszt-Syrakuzy 2021), and of the Polish edition of Memoirs of Glickl of Hammeln (Glikl. Siedem ksiąg. Pamiętniki z lat 1691-1719, transl. Anna Rutkowski, Warszawa 2021).

Sergey R. Kravtsov, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow at the Center for Jewish Art, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Lviv, Ukraine, he was trained as an architect in his native city. He received his doctoral degree from the Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture in Moscow, Russia, in 1993 and moved to Israel in 1994. His research areas are the history of town planning, architectural theory, and the history of synagogue architecture. He is the author of Di Gildene Royze: The Turei Zahav Synagogue in L'viv (2011) and In the Shadow of Empires: Synagogue Architecture in East-Central Europe (2018), a co-author of Synagogues in Lithuania: A Catalogue (2010-2012) and Synagogues in Ukraine: Volhynia (2017). He has also published about ninety essays in his research areas and edited and co-edited three books.

Andrew Zalewski, MD is a physician and former professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He authored two books on Austrian Galicia: Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family (2012) and Galician Portraits: In Search of Jewish Roots (2014), reconstructing the story of his ancestors in a broader historical context. As vice president of Gesher Galicia, he led archival research on Jewish educational access, in part, supported by the grant from the Republic of Austria. His writings have focused on Jewish cultural transformation, impact of Jewish physicians, and Jewish legal rights in Galicia. Andrew Zalewski is a frequent speaker at cultural and academic institutions in the US and abroad. His course on Jews of Galicia, offered via Gratz College, examines internal and external forces behind Jewish path to modernity. Unique archival records provide the background for his in-depth description of multiethnic Galicia.