Dr Wall alongside an ambulance - Palestine 1943 

Dr. Norman Wall is honored by Sheba for his role in helping to establish Sheba Medical Center 

To hear Dr. Norman Wall tell it, what he did was all very simple. But at a luncheon at Florida Hospital in Orlando on Dec. 3, he and the US army were honored by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer – the Middle East’s largest medical facility – for their essential roles in its founding. The two hospitals also announced their exploration of a partnership to cooperate in research and education.

Wall, a 96-year-old cardiologist who grew up in Pennsylvania as one of nine children in an ardent Zionist family, moved to Central Florida in 1995. His career included rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the army and practicing for more than 50 years at the Good Samaritan Catholic hospital in Pennsylvania where he is still remembered as a beloved chief of staff, chief of medicine and cardiology and director of medical education.

Sheba head Prof. Zeev Rotstein, who presented his hospital’s award to Wall, told the audience, “Norman Wall brought American technology of the 1940s to Palestine. Everything was dependent on the British Mandate at the time, and the British looked upon the local population as second class. Dr. Wall actually pushed forward the ability of the Jewish doctors there to treat military and civilian patients.”

There are two versions of the little-known story of how, during World War II, the U.S. army helped plant the seeds of what was to become the Sheba Medical Center.

The official version is that in October 1943, the army’s 24th field station hospital at Tel Litwinsky (now Tel Hashomer), a camp established to treat allied casualties from the North African campaign, turned over its surplus medical supplies and equipment to Haganah doctors treating patients in a crumbling Ottoman-era facility in nearby Tel Aviv.  British forces took over the U.S. army’s abandoned Camp Tel Litwinsky medical station and operated it until Israel declared independence in 1948. The hilltop site was then captured and occupied by Israeli forces whereupon it became Tel Hashomer hospital, an army treatment center ultimately growing into the sprawling civilian complex it is today, a hospital and research institute and the primary treatment center for soldiers and terror victims.

The unofficial version is that a Jewish US army doctor serving with the evacuating unit, Captain Norman Wall, was concerned that if the supplies were turned over to the British they would in turn be handed over to their Arab allies. So, on his own and without authorization, Wall collected the material and personally loaded his jeep at least a dozen times with hard-to-find medicines, operating room instruments, supplies and X-ray film, and delivered it all to skeptical Haganah soldiers, who concealed it in the hollow base of a kibbutz water tower ("right next to arms and ammunition smuggled from other sources", Wall said).

The Israelis were skeptical for good reason: Wall was wearing an Allied uniform, didn’t look Jewish and he had an English-sounding name. But the young physician from Pennsylvania’s coal country, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, persisted in donating the supplies. In the process he formed a lifelong relationship with the legendary Dr. Chaim Sheba, founder of Israel’s medical corps, who became the army’s first chief medical officer and for whom the hospital was later named.

 “Life is a matter of luck and destiny,” Wall said Dec. 3, repeating a quote he attributes to Albert Einstein. “The army in those days sent you anywhere. They could have sent me to Japan or the Philippines, but they sent me to Palestine.”

He started out in the medical corps with two close buddies, one of whom was killed at Anzio, the other in the Solomon Islands. The 27-year-old Wall and his friends joined the medical corps before Pearl Harbor “because it gave us 50 bucks a month.” He then shipped out from Newport News, Va. to various posts in Africa and in Palestine where the British waited for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his German Afrika Korps to sweep east. Rommel was on the verge of entering Cairo, Wall remembered, where the notoriously anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem awaited him amid a sea of swastikas. “The British were losing very badly.” And everyone knew what would happen if the Germans were to enter Palestine.

The 24th’s field hospital at Tel Litwinsky was situated in “a beautiful little village in an orange grove,” said Wall.  “There were only two buildings: an operating room and the radiology department. The rest was tents, and the wards were in Quonset huts. I believe some are still there.”

After British Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery defeated Rommel at the Second Battle of El-Alamein, there wasn’t much to do at Tel Litwinsky.  The one car was designated for the use of the commanding officer. There was one ambulance. Wall had charge of the one jeep “which I used very freely” in his travels as the sanitary officer inspecting restaurants in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

 “In my jeep I tried to get as much medical equipment as we could,” said Wall. The army would not have been able to take everything when it moved on and “we didn’t want our materials to be vandalized by the Arabs.” The British, he said, were “very snobby, very pro-Arab and very anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish.” Local Jews “were treated pretty badly” so “they hated anyone in a uniform.”

He tried to identify himself to the Israelis as a fellow Jew. “I said, ‘I want to help you.’ No dice.”  His friendship with Chaim Sheba, then a senior doctor with the Haganah, was one of Wall’s first successes. But Sheba had to do things “very quietly and carefully. If the British had caught him they would have put him in jail.  The most I would have received was a reprimand from the Americans. So I said, ‘The hell with it.” His resourcefulness is still paying off.  The tools and knowhow Wall and the army left behind for the Israelis in 1943 have blossomed into what Zeev Rotstein calls “an island of peace, tranquility and sanity in a very stormy region. We have had, unfortunately, all too much experience at treating victims of terror and war. Yet at Sheba, we practice peaceful coexistence on a daily basis.” 

The hospital provides equal levels of care to Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims, Christians and Jews. One million patients – including citizens of Arab countries – enter its doors each year. It serves as Israel’s national blood bank center and the official hospital of the IDF. One-quarter of Israel’s medical research is conducted there, and its center for medical simulation trains professionals from health facilities worldwide.

Wall has revisited Israel many times. His three children all married Israelis, and he has Israeli grandchildren and great-grandchildren. During his years heading Good Samaritan Hospital in Pottsville, Pa., he brought dozens of Israeli medical students over to study and two of them now serve at Sheba.  Wall was also instrumental in the development of Ben Gurion hospital and medical school in the Negev.

In the late 1970s, at the request of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, he and his older son, Jay, smuggled medical supplies, especially insulin and digitalis, to Jews in Russia and the Ukraine. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War he arranged for a surgical supply company in the Midwest to donate highly specialized equipment to the Lady Sieff hospital in Safed to treat Israeli soldiers whose bones were being shattered when their tanks imploded under attack.

An active leader in the Anti-Defamation League, Wall battled anti-Semitism many times in his career. But he remembers being warmly welcomed by the Catholic sisters at Good Samaritan decades ago.

 “Sister, I’m a Jew,” he said to the nun in charge.  “You take care of the medicine,” said Sister Mary Agnes, “and I’ll take care of the praying.”

Wall welcomes the partnership between Sheba and Florida Hospital, a Seventh Day Adventist organization. He reflected on the advances in his own lifetime from the “primitive medicine of Hippocrates” he saw being practiced in his medical school days to the advent of penicillin and modern surgical techniques, and said that the two hospitals will “make a future that none of us can see.”

The night before the ceremony Wall told a small group of family and friends that in deference to his Florida Hospital hosts and Gen. Gamble, he intended to finesse the ambiguity about whether the army knew it was donating supplies to the Jewish underground. Since there is no one else alive today who was there, only Wall himself knows the truth.

So it was left to Wall’s rabbi, Steven Engel of Congregation of Reform Judaism in Orlando, to make light-hearted reference to Wall’s donation, saying that after all these years the army should send the nonagenarian an invoice for the medical supplies they contributed.

Lyn Davidson is associate editor of the Heritage Florida Jewish News. Mark I. Pinsky was formerly religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, and is currently a freelance writer for Politics Daily and a variety of other online news sources.

Reprinted with kind permission of Heritage Florida Jewish News where the story was originally published on 13/12/2010.