A week ago it was JTS; this week Hadassah. Organizations continuing to put up “walls” in dealing with the press.

Nancy Falchuk and three unidentified colleagues have called for a “cease-fire” in which Hadassah doctors would not grant interviews to the Israeli press in the ongoing confrontation over the departure of HMO director-general Shlomo Mor-Yosef.

Actions like this just do not make the cut in a post-Madoff world. No wonder the continuing problems facing Hadassah and Young Judaea have become the single most talked about subject in Jerusalem.

The JTA’s weekly philanthropy newsletter had this to say today:

“In light of the circumstances, the hospital employees decided to call on the Board of Directors to be replaced so that it is made up of persons who understand the culture and economics of medicine in Israel, and so it will consist of a majority of agents faithfully representing the hospital’s goals, as opposed to the present situation in which the Hadassah Women have a majority on the Board of Directors,” Avinoam Reches, one of two doctors taking a lead for the union, wrote in a news release following the meeting.

… They are trying to run the hospital and are detached from the culture of the hospital, and they don’t respond to our very polite letter,” he said. “We are professors of medicine. We are not working in sweatshops in the Lower East Side, and we are not workers for Nike in Indonesia. We have an opinion … and it is impossible that Nancy Falchuk is the only one that is right.”

from today’s The Jerusalem Post:

Hadassah national president rejects mediation over Mor-Yosef

A tense confrontation took place Thursday night between Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization of America national president Nancy Falchuk and six of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s most senior physicians. At the end, the physicians said the two sides had a “serious and deep crisis of trust” over the HWZOA leader’s refusal to allow HMO director-general Prof. Shlomo Mor-Yosef to continue for another term.

The doctors were represented by Prof. Avinoam Reches (neurology), Prof. Rafael Yudasin (pediatric surgery), Prof. Arieh Shalev (psychiatry), Prof. Chaim Lotan (cardiology) and Prof. Shlomo Ma’ayan (infectious diseases). “We asked for the meeting and tried to have a dialogue about the HWZOA board’s decision not to allow Mor-Yosef to continue in his post after January and about issues of HMO’s financial future,” said Reches, a leader of the senior doctor’s union at Hadassah.

Reches said no agreement was reached and that Falchuk rejected mediation over Mor-Yosef’s departure after 10 years in the post. He added that at the end of the meeting at Jerusalem’s Inbal Hotel, Falchuk said she would return for more conversations in Jerusalem in three weeks, but that Reches would not be allowed to attend.