Hadassah Hospital Chief Abruptly Resigns
The CEO of Jerusalem’s financially troubled Hadassah Medical Center has resigned.
In his resignation letter Monday, Avigdor Kaplan said he objected to the recent agreement between Hadassah and the Israeli government calling for a state-appointed financial controller to oversee the hospital’s seven-year recovery plan, according to Globes, an Israeli business publication.
Citing sources in the health system, Globes reported that Kaplan was actually forced to step down because of recent conflicts between him and the Hadassah board.
Tamar Yablonski-Peretz, who heads Hadassah’s Sharett Institute of Oncology, will succeed Kaplan on an interim basis. The hospital, which is saddled with nearly $370 million in debt and an annual deficit exceeding $85 million, declared bankruptcy in February.
The recovery plan, developed in May, calls for the hospital to draw funding equally from the Israeli government and the Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which owns the hospital.
Under the plan, Hadassah is to lay off 30 doctors and researchers, as well as hundreds of employees, according to Haaretz.
The plan also calls for the hospital to close several departments and restructure its board.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO