The Establishment of the Rambam Hospital in Haifa
The Rambam Hospital in Haifa was established on December 22, 1938. It is the fifth-largest hospital in Israel today and the biggest in the northern area.
When the hospital opened, it was the days before the establishment of the State of Israel; still under the British Mandate. The relationships between the Jewish and Arab folk weren't too tight, to say the least, but that didn't interfere with the Hospital's diverse staff. The hospital staff consisted of both Jewish and Arab doctors and nurses, and they actually got along together pretty well.
The hospital was quite a busy place since the day it opened. During the time of the Mandate, many injured Jews and Arabs were treated by the staff, especially since it was the only hospital up north. During the War of Independence, the hospital revied almost all of the injured soldiers from the battlefields up north. Over the years the hospital grew, and in 1971, the first medical school year opened in its gates.
The Rambam hospital is the medical center that treated the most trauma injuries in Israel, due to the fact that the northern border is the only border that Israel isn't at peace with, and since the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Israel's wars were fought up north.
After the Second Lebanon War, the hospital realized that it can be a target for enemy missiles, so the project to build an underground protected hospital went underway. In 2013, after five years of building, the Rambam protected hospital was inaugurated, the biggest of its kind in the world (60,000 square meters underground).
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