Taking home a new baby is nearly always a daunting experience for first-time parents. It is much more frightening for couples whose baby was born early and brought home after weeks or months in a neonatal intensive care unit due to prematurity or other reasons. Prof.
Michael Schimmel, a specialist in neonatology – care of the newborn – for 43 years, ran the neonatal intensive-care unit at (SZMC) for 24 years. He went on pension in 2019 but decided not to devote all his free time to leisure. Together with the Jerusalem Municipality, Schimmel established three centers to counsel parents of premature babies and others discharged from intensive care units.
These are the only centers for counseling bewildered parents and following up on their infants in Israel – and the world. He joined Israel’s first neonatology department, established in 1978 by the esteemed Prof. Arthur Eidelman, who settled with his family in Jerusalem after completing his medical degree at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine and specializing in pediatrics at Yale University’s School of Medicine.
After neonatology was accepted as a sub-specialty in the US, Eidelman was asked to establish and set the standards and training programs at the SZMC neonatology department. Neonatology was recognized as a specialty in Israel in 1985. When Schimmel, who spent two years specializing at Columbia University Medical Center, joined Eidelman, there were four beds for newborns; when he left, t.