Reinventing Himself

HEALTH

Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz

Reinventing Himself

Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz enjoys a second career teaching medical students about bioethics.

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Rabbi 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 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.

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OUWB Assistant Professor Amy DeBaets, Ph.D., Ruth Stern, Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz and Dr. Guy Stern.

“Just as I am passionate about transmitting the tragic lessons of history to the next generation of physicians, I want them to know about Jewish physicians and nurses who rose to great heights and remained true to high ethical standards in caring for people in ghettos and concentration camps even at the risk of their lives.”

In planning seminar content, Yoskowitz consulted with Professor Dan Michman, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Israel.

“He and I met after he learned about my interest in bioethics and the Holocaust,” the rabbi said. “He suggested that while it was important to learn about the terrible things that Nazi physicians did, it’s also important to teach the students about the models of health care. He would show me articles written about Jewish doctors that came from students he supervised and today are professors.”

Yoskowitz, who has been asked to write bioethics articles for national publications, connected to Oakland University programming after being invited to give a sample lecture and then getting students’ reactions.

He describes one of the most dramatic student comments had to do with chronic disease. The student believed that if she had lived during a time and place of Nazi control, her killing would have resulted because of a health condition even though she was not Jewish.

“I feel very fortunate to have accepted this teaching position as a continuation of what I do as a rabbi,” Yoskowitz said. “It’s so important to teach about the Jewish spirit and how it can make a difference in the world, whether it’s done in a synagogue setting or an academic setting, including a medical school.”

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