Establishment of Hospitalization Services in Beer Sheva

In the last days of 1953, the mayor of Beer Sheva, David Tuviahu, appealed to Moshe Soroka requesting that Kupat Holim establish a general central hospital in the Negev. The rationale behind Tuviahu's request was that Hadassah asked to withdraw from operation of the town's small one hundred bed hospital due to its commitment to establish a medical center in Ein Karem in Jerusalem, after the loss of Hadassah's main Jerusalem facility on Mt. Scopus in the 1948 war. The Ministry of Health had told Tuviahu that it did not plan to build a hospital in Beer Sheva in the coming decade, thus the only option in Tuviahu's hands was to appeal to Kupat Holim.

Yet, Soroka and Kupat Holim feared that if they would become involved in the hospitalization domain in the Negev, it would rekindle tension between the sick fund and the Ministry of Health—particularly in light of the opposition of the presiding minister of health Yosef Serlin to any expansion of Kupat Holim's hospitalization network—a domain where the ministry itself aspired to be the dominant health agent. When Reuven Kleigler, the manager of Kupat Holim's Negev District, tried to convince Soroka to agree despite his apprehensions, Soroka claimed: “They'll kill me; they'll stone me, if I now enter into the building of a hospital in Beer Sheva.”