Aron Brand

Aron Brand was born in 1910 in Ozorków

Brand was born in 1910 in Ozorków, near Łódź, and grew up in nearby Koło, where he attended heder and a Jewish gymnasium. His father Natan, a Zionist grain merchant and miller, sent him in 1925 to study at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. His mother, Esther Haya, was killed in the Holocaust.

In 1928 he began studies at the University of Berlin and at the Hochschule for Jewish studies, where he befriended Abraham Joshua Heschel. At the Hochschule he earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1933 and was ordained as a rabbi. He received a doctorate in medicine from the University of Berlin in 1935.

In 1939 he married Esther Malka Aurbach, and the couple had three sons. He was active in the Haganah and the Irgun and later served in the IDF. From 1948 to 1952 he worked as a doctor in transit camps around Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh.

He founded the Jerusalem Academy of Medicine in 1955 and organized many public lectures on health. From 1964 to 1976 he headed the pediatric department of Bikur Cholim Hospital, and in 1971 he became chairman of the Israel Medical Association's national council. He published over 100 medical papers and over 50 works on history, Judaism, philosophy and literature.

He died in 1977. In 1984 the Jerusalem municipality named a street in Har Nof after him.