Yehuda Lewis (originally, Yehuda Leib) Reisman was born in June 1946 in Poland. His parents had met in Kazakhstan while on the run from the Nazis – his father from Poland, his mother from Bessarabia, now Moldova.
Five weeks after Reisman’s birth, the little family fled following the infamous Kielce pogrom. The infant cried incessantly because his malnourished mother wasn’t producing enough milk; his parents tried to keep him pacified with a rag to suck on.
The family stayed in an American-run displaced persons camp in West Germany until Reisman was four.
From Europe to Brooklyn
“My father wanted to go to Israel, but my mother’s brother in Israel wrote to them in 1947 that there was war and not enough to eat. He advised them to go to America.
“My mother had an uncle who’d run away in 1905 from the Kishinev pogrom, so we went to his home in Staten Island. After a couple of months, we moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Reisman relates.
His hassidic-raised father enrolled the boy in a Lubavitch yeshiva. His mother took him to the school bus stop every morning for a week, and each time, Reisman vomited on the vehicle. After a week, the driver didn’t even stop to pick him up, so Reisman’s mother – bareheaded and wearing short sleeves – took him to school herself. The dual discomfort at first glance spelled the end of that educational episode. Reisman was promptly sent to public school.
“I’m not a hassid today because of motion sickness,” Reisman sums up with a laugh.
As a teenager, he took the subway with three friends to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, a school geared for boys gifted in science and math. The commuters joined the secular, kibbutz-affiliated Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement and eventually made aliyah.
Brooklyn to Israel
Reisman arrived in Israel on what turned out to be the final day of the 1967 Six Day War, aiming to volunteer for the army. He had just graduated from Brooklyn College and planned to go to medical school.
Instead, he spent the summer picking bananas on Kibbutz Barkai in Wadi Ara. And he decided to stay. He was accepted to a six-year BA-MD program at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical School, entering in January 1968, midway through the second year, as he already had a BA.
During the seventh year, while doing rotating internships at Hadassah, Reisman met his future wife, sixth-generation Jerusalemite Dalia Stern, head nurse of pediatrics. In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, the interns were reassigned to care for the wounded from the Sinai campaign.
“To this day, I have a mental picture of all these torn-up adolescent soldiers crying, ‘Ima, Ima (Mom, Mom)!’” Reisman recalls.
Over the next year, he served in the IDF as an artillery battalion physician in the Golan Heights, and then in air evacuation. During that time, the married couple welcomed a daughter. Afterward, they moved to Rehovot, as Reisman planned to specialize in pediatrics at Kaplan Medical Center, located there.
Back to the US
But that plan fell apart due to a bureaucratic snafu, and he worked at Kaplan for just six months. The experience left him so embittered that he applied for work in the United States and took his family there in June 1976. He ended up staying in the US for 38 years.
Reisman worked in pediatric nephrology at several large medical centers in New York and New Jersey. In New Jersey, he taught at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick and started a pediatric kidney transplant program at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Newark in 1996.
“When I started training in pediatric nephrology in 1978, dialysis was awful for children, and pediatric kidney transplantation had a 50% success rate. Today, dialysis is better, though still awful for children, but kidney transplantation has a much better success rate. I see organ transplantation as magic to this day; it’s a second life for children.”
Dalia, after giving birth to two more children, worked as an operating room nurse and then as a school nurse. She never became assimilated, her husband says. “My wife lived as an Israeli in America.”
The final stop on their American odyssey was Shreveport, Louisiana, before returning to Israel in 2014.
Coming home
“I always expected to come back. My kids tell me I was constantly talking about going back. But I was happy; my career was going well. Each time I thought of going back to Israel, there was the issue of finding a decent job. So we didn’t leave America until I was almost ready to retire.”
Despite his solid credentials, he wrangled with the Israeli Health Ministry for about three years before securing a permanent medical license. He finished his career working part time in pediatric nephrology at Soroka Medical Center, Schneider Children’s Medical Center, and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center’s Dwek Children’s Hospital.
The long sojourn abroad convinced him that Israeli healthcare is superior. “The basic ideology in the US is ‘every man for himself,’ while in Israel it’s Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh – ‘all Jews are responsible for one another,’” he says. “I was both a patient and a doctor in both places, and medicine is better and more humane in Israel.”
Reisman considers it “the big tragedy of my life” that all his children and grandchildren live in America.
Volunteer work
He and Dalia travel to see them every summer. During that time, Reisman also volunteers at the Frost Valley YMCA Kidney Camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains, founded in 1975 in partnership with the Ruth Gottscho Kidney Foundation for children with kidney disease or kidney transplants.
Reisman volunteered in the camp’s dialysis clinic from 1981 to 2001 before moving to Louisiana. He returned in 2017, when the camp agreed to include several Israeli children annually. He covered their travel expenses “with a little support from others” until this summer’s agreement by Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva to foot that bill for three campers.
Reisman, who earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University, also volunteered with refugees in Haiti and Lesbos, and he helps staff pediatric clinics run by Physicians for Human Rights in the Palestinian Authority territories.
“I went into public health and volunteering after a young child died on a boat coming from Libya to Europe,” he says. “I identified with that kid. He could have been me. I was a refugee, too.”
Now he’s truly home. And although he is unhappy with Israel’s current political leadership, he’s not leaving again.
“I was a Jewish nationalist from the time I was born. This is where I’m going to stay, and this is where I’m going to die,” he declares. “This is my country, and I love it.”
Dr. Yehuda Lewis Reisman, 79 From Brooklyn to Jerusalem, 1967