Remembering Leon and Ruth Davidoff

The Fourth Annual Meeting of the International Board of the Davidoff Cancer Center, held May 23rd-25th, 2010 was the first board meeting held since the death in 2009 of Ruth and Leon Davidoff, who together with Leon's brother, Jacques, and his wife, Monique, founded the Davidoff Center, the most advanced cancer center in the Middle East.

In honor and remembrance of Ruth and Leon's generosity, a unique memorial service took place at the opening of the symposium on prostate cancer. Ruth and Leon's children-Aline, Alberto and his wife Monica, Claudia and her husband Joseph and Suzy-two of the grandchildren, their nephew, Paul, and other family and friends from Israel participated in the event.

Aline Davidoff, who spoke on behalf of the family, celebrated her parents in a speech that captured their everlasting spirit and contribution to mankind. "Only a year has passed," she remarked, "since we, some of us from afar, were here remembering Ruti. And now, we remember them, Ruti and Leon, Leon and Ruti. It has been a long year-the longest year. We were all left-all of us-his family, his friends, Rabin Medical Center, the doctors, the nurses, even this country at large... They left us the job of honesty and simplicity, of hard work and constant betterment of the self, the task of giving the best treatment possible to cancer patients in the Middle East and even doctors, the job to find the elusive cure. They left us the task of finding peace in the Middle East. They left us the task of educating people in every way, of rescuing clear thought and ethics, of caring for water and trees. The task of looking at things exactly the way they are and steering back to course every time it is necessary. No simple task. But then, in one breath, a phrase they lived by, a line in fact, that pushed them forward, and us to the future with the passion that was theirs: 'Ah but man's reach should exceed his grasp or what is a Heaven for?'"

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