Jewish doctors form group to fight anti-Semitism in medicine: ‘It’s Nazi Germany again’

Jewish doctors alarmed by “rampant” anti-Semitism and even violence in US health care facilities have formed their own national advocacy group to fight hate in medicine.

Thousands of medical professionals from across the country have joined the new American Jewish Medical Association to advocate for Jews, the group recently told The Post.

“It is fundamentally frightening to those of us who care about humanity. It’s Nazi Germany all over again,” said Manhattan plastic surgeon Yael Halaas, founder and president of the new group and a graduate of Columbia University and Cornell Medical School.

The leveled anti-Jewish hatred following the occupation of Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on October 7 hit home for Halaas, whose Jewish parents immigrated to the US from Cuba and Argentina.

Many members of her father’s family were killed in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

Medical schools in particular have become hostile environments for Jewish students, organizers said.

Among the disturbing incidents:

-The George Washington University School of Medicine hosted a faculty panel in December that declared that terrorists have the right to resist Israel.

– Some medical professionals have praised the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and denied that the victims in Israel were sexually assaulted.

– A sign reading, “Free Palestine from Nazi Zionist Schwein” – the German word for “pig” – was displayed in front of the cancer center at the University of California at San Francisco medical school.

— Anti-Israel protesters at rallies at the Columbia University School of Medicine/Mailman School of Public Health have chanted “From the river to the sea,” a phrase many interpret as calling for the elimination of Israel and celebrating suicide bombers who kill Israelis.

“Jewish medical students have been bullied into silence,” Halaas said. “They are being excluded. It should not be controversial to say that Israel is an integral part of Jewish identity.

“Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism,” she said.

The term “Zionism” refers to the right of the Jewish state to exist.

Orthopedist Cary Schwartzbach, a Queens native who practices in Fairfax, Va., and a son of Holocaust survivors and treasurer of the new group, said: “Oct. 7 was a wake-up call.

“It opened the floodgates for anti-Semitism,” said the doctor.

“There is a feeling of hostility against the Jews. Anti-Semitism has made many hospital residency programs uncomfortable for Jewish students,” he said.

“We need a voice. We must protect ourselves. We need to protect medical school students.”

Larisa Geskin, an oncologist and director of the Comprehensive Skin Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center, who immigrated from Latvia to the former Soviet Union when she was 20, said she was shocked by the anti-Semitism she had personally witnessed on campus. .

“There is rampant anti-Semitism in the medical community,” the 56-year-old doctor said.

“This is very familiar to me. In the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was rampant. “I never thought I would hear the same rhetoric in the United States that I heard in the Soviet Union,” she said.

Given how Jews have been abused throughout history, doctors said it’s horrifying to hear propaganda that portrays Israelis as white oppressors.

“Jews are also a minority. We need protection like other minorities,” said Geskin.

“We see history repeating itself. We feel we should say something. They sang “From the River to the Sea” in my yard. This is what is happening in the medical community.”