Seeking to honor the Jewish state’s first woman surgeon

Five Towners raising money for a breast health center in Israel

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About 20 people gathered at the Beer family home in Woodmere on June 21 to announce the establishment of a medical center devoted to breast health and their discuss fundraising efforts.
The center would be named after Ida Lunsky, the mother of two daughter who are doctors, who was the first female surgeon in Israel.
Born in Lithuania in 1939, Lunsky and her family survived the Holocaust by escaping to Siberia. They returned to Lithuania and shortly after, she made Aliyah (returned to Israel) in 1959. She devoted her life to medicine there, performing special surgeries and training surgeons. She died of breast cancer in 2012.
The breast health center would be housed at the Ziv Medical Center in Zefat, Israel. The existing medical center is the only hospital serving 34,000 residents of the in the Upper Galilee and northern Golan Heights region areas and a total of a quarter of million people, which includes Jews from other parts of Israel, Muslims, Christians, and refugees from Syria.
Esther Sutofsky, Lunsky’s cousin, said that the breast health center is desperately needed in the area. “The area is underserved,” she said. “For example, with mammography, sometimes there are long waits for the patients to be seen. While they wait, they have to sit in their paper gowns in the waiting room right along with people being treated for many other things. They are uncomfortable sitting there among the other people.”

The group has raised $55,000 to date and at least another $900,000 is needed for construction and to purchase or lease the necessary medical equipment, according to Michael Beer, a Woodmere lawyer who is also Sutofsky’s son-in-law.
“We have raised $15,000 here and about $40,000 in Israel,” he said. “This money goes toward the facility. We’re raising money for the mammogram machines and the tools needed to conduct preventative screening for the patients.”
The Beer family and their supporters are contributing their efforts to a Miami-based non-profit, tax-exempt organization called the Friends of Ziv Medical Center. Sima Rosenthal is a board member of the organization and her husband, Raul, is the president of surgery at Ziv. Rosenthal said that so far, her group has had more American people contributing funds to the organization.
“Every hospital in Israel is doing fundraisers to support themselves,” she said. “The government, in general, funds very little for every hospital. We are still at the beginning of our fundraising efforts. We’d love other groups to help. We welcome anything.”
Sutofsky thinks that the breast health center is the best way to honor her cousin. “It’s a wonderfully befitting memorial to her,” she said. “It’s what she would have wanted. That’s the person she was.”
To donate go to zivsfriends@gmail.com.