HEALTH Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz
Reinventing Himself Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz enjoys a second career teaching medical students about bioethics. SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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abbi Herbert Yoskowitz stepped away from being the full-time spiritual leader of Adat Shalom Synagogue in 2018, but he has not stepped away from professional leadership in the ethical imperative of the rabbinate. The rabbi’s central commitment has moved from synagogue to academia as he regularly conducts two seven-session seminars at the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine. Both are part of the for-credit elective curriculum. Jewish Bioethics, which began in 2012 with the
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opening of the medical school, regularly changes as it covers current health issues, such as treatment allotments during COVID. Nazi Medicine and Its Impact on the Founding of Bioethics, which began in 2017, has an historic orientation as it delves into the influence of German anatomists on politics, medical experiments without informed consent and attitudes toward eugenics. “My goal as a rabbi and educator is to try to teach the students that they should not be passive,” said Yoskowitz, who has been surprised that most of the students
enrolling in his seminars have not been Jewish. “Medical students should learn to be active in defending the ethics that we try to teach them to make a difference in the places they occupy as medical students and throughout the time they serve as physicians. “Since becoming a rabbi in the 1970s, I have believed that the most important aspect of Judaism is the respect for human life regardless of race or religion, and so issues of bioethics remain central to what I want to communicate.” Yoskowitz, whose next Jewish Bioethics series starts in late summer and whose next Nazi Medicine series returns in the fall, also speaks on specific bioethical topics before medical students at other schools. He points out that after World War II, the issues were addressed through The Nuremberg Code as a consequence of courtroom trials revealing the extent of Nazi medical cruelty. Some 120 students have attended Yoskowitz’s seminars, reading the assigned articles and preparing required papers based on their own research interests. SOMETHING NEW This year, two major changes are occurring in what will be offered through the second seminar. The most far-reaching is the planning of a trip to Poland so students can experience the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and observe the structures where devastating experiments occurred. The second is a salute to personnel staffing the Israeli field hospital established in Ukraine. “The Jewish doctors who have set up a field hospital are consistent with what Jewish physicians have done through the centuries,” Yoskowitz said. “We Jews, within our ethical system, believe that all people are created in the image of God. Therefore, when we are helping to heal people, we are partners with God and what God intended us to do.” A continuing seminar speaker is Guy Stern, retired Wayne State University professor and Holocaust survivor who served with a United States World War II military intelligence interrogation team. Students also visit the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills. “History has proven that we must learn from the lessons of the past in order to increase the chances of avoiding the repetition of the same errors,” Yoskowitz said about his immersion into this topic after graduate education in history at Rice University in Texas and participation in a bioethics fellowship sponsored by the Bush Foundation Leadership Program with study at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
