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.”