Yehezkel Caine

Yehezkel Caine was born in 1949 in London

Caine was born in London in 1949 to a religious family and was first called Jeff. His parents were Dvora and the urologist Professor Mordechai Marco Caine. The family moved to Israel in 1959 and settled in Jerusalem, where he took the Hebrew name Yehezkel.

He joined the air cadet youth program in 1961 and flew solo in a light plane at 14. From 1967 to 1973 he studied medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem through the academic reserve. He later trained in aviation medicine in the United States and earned an M.Sc in industrial management and business administration from Ben-Gurion University in 1995.

During the Yom Kippur War he served as a doctor in airborne evacuation and later with forces west of the Suez Canal. He completed pilot training between 1974 and 1976 and flew Bell 205 helicopters in Squadron 123 for more than 20 years. From 1991 to 1994 he was the Air Force chief medical officer with the rank of colonel.

He trained in surgery at Hadassah Ein Kerem from 1978 to 1985 and became a senior surgeon there. In 1986 and 1987 he was a visiting scientist at MIT and a lecturer at Harvard. In 1995 he became director general of Herzog Hospital, a post he held until December 2020.

He led the Israeli Society of Aerospace Medicine from 1992 to 1994. In 2023 he received the Bonei Zion Prize for lifetime achievement. He is married to Susan and they have 3 children.