Auguste Viktoria Hospital (Jerusalem)

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The Auguste-Viktoria-Hospital on the Jerusalem Mount of Olives is an originally German hospice and hospital of the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Stiftung, which opened in 1910. It has been supported by the Lutheran World Federation since 1948 .

The hospital provides life-saving medical care for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including specialized therapies in its cancer, diabetes and children's wards. It is the only facility that offers radiation therapy to the 4.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank .

The hospital is part of the East Jerusalem Hospital Network, a network of six specialized hospitals in the Palestinian health system. In 2016 it was accredited by the Joint Commission International (JCI) for a further three years. This US-based organization certifies hospitals and healthcare facilities worldwide and has checked all levels of the AVK for quality assurance and patient safety criteria.

history

Augusta Victoria Hospital with Assumption Church , 1921 under the British flag
Portal of the hospital

The hospital owes its establishment to a promise made by Kaiser Wilhelm II on his Palestine trip in 1898 to the German residents of Palestine. In 1903 the German consul in Jerusalem Edmund Schmidt (1855–1916) succeeded in buying a complex of around 32 acres on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. In 1904, the board of trustees of the Auguste Victoria Pfingsthaus Foundation in Potsdam agreed to take over the sponsorship.

After the widow Laura Oelbermann , b. Nickel, (1846–1929; raised to the nobility in 1918 by Kaiser Wilhelm II for their social commitment) from Cologne donated 1 million marks to the foundation, in 1906 the construction work was entrusted to Gause & Leibnitz . The foundation deed of the so-called Ölbergstiftung was signed on January 27, 1907 by Wilhelm II, his wife Auguste Viktoria , all the princes and Princess Viktoria Luise . With the Mount of Olives Cross , a Prussian order was established in 1909 for men and women who had rendered outstanding services to the Mount of Olives Foundation. For the laying of the foundation stone on March 31, 1907, the Emperor sent Ernst Dryander (1843–1922), Vice President of the Old Prussian Evangelical High Church Council in Berlin.

Apart from lime, stone and water, all of the material for the building complex, which also includes the Evangelical Church of the Assumption , as well as the entire interior furnishings were procured from Europe. The inauguration took place on April 9, 1910, at which Prince Eitel Friedrich von Prussia and his wife Sophie Charlotte von Oldenburg represented the imperial couple.

The Kaiserswerth deaconess Theodore Barkhausen (1869–1959), daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm Barkhausen , headed Kaiserswerth's work in the Orient in the period before the First World War up to the Israeli War of Independence after the Second World War and under extremely changeable political conditions.

In 1909/10 the Order of St. John took over the protection of the foundation, which is now estimated at a total of 2.5 million marks. The area had meanwhile been expanded to around 80 acres through land acquisitions.

A German military hospital was housed in the building during the First World War, and it served as the headquarters for Cemal Pascha from 1915 to 1917 . From June to December 1917, the high command of the German Asia Corps was here . During the mandate , the building was the seat of the British High Commissioner Herbert Louis Samuel from 1920–1927 . In 1927 the building was damaged by a strong earthquake. In 1928 the World Mission Conference of the International Mission Council (a forerunner of the World Council of Churches ) met in the premises of the Mount of Olives Foundation.

From 1937 the malaria hospice was transformed into a hospital by the Diakoniewerk Kaiserswerth . During the Second World War , a British military hospital for the Arab Legion was housed in the building from 1939 .

The International Committee of the Red Cross used the hospital for Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Jewish-Arab War . In 1950 the Lutheran World Federation took over the sponsorship - in long-term cooperation with the “ United Nations Relief Organization for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East ” (UNRWA).

Acute hospital

The hospital, now known as Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH), is located in East Jerusalem and mainly cares for the Palestinian population. Around 75% of the patients come from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. In terms of equipment, it is roughly equivalent to a hospital providing specialized care with its departments for internal medicine , general surgery , anesthesia and emergency medicine , ENT , oncology , pediatrics , radiology and laboratory medicine . The acute hospital also operates an outpatient clinic and dialysis units for children and adults. It promotes health education with nutritional advice and diabetes prophylaxis. Internships and training programs are offered for young doctors, medical students and nursing professions.

From 1950–1991 the pediatric department or hospital was headed by Amin al-Majaj (1921–1999), who was Deputy Mayor of East Jerusalem from 1950 to 1964 , Jordanian Minister of Health in 1957 and 1964, Member of the Jordanian Parliament from 1967–1988 and 1977–1999 ( not recognized by Israel) was honorary mayor of East Jerusalem. In 2016 the hospital was expanded to include a bone marrow transplant ward.

The AVK has a license for 172 inpatient places, but due to the high demand, some inpatient beds had to be moved to the outpatient area. The limitation to 120 inpatient beds allows more outpatients to receive chemotherapy, diagnosis, or radiation therapy. The hospital has leased a 100-bed hotel nearby, where patients can stay during the three-week therapy cycles.

In July 2014, during the Israeli military offensive, the AVK set up an emergency unit with space for four intensive care and 12 surgical patients, in which injured people from the Gaza Strip could be admitted and cared for around the clock. "By providing medical care for those affected, the LWF is helping to comply with the international conventions on dealing with those injured in conflicts," said the then Director of the LWF Department for World Service, Rev. Eberhard Hitzler, explaining the measure. "The LWF does everything in its power not only to demand the protection of the civilian population, but also to follow up this demand with concrete aid measures for those who have been harmed."

Walid Nammour has been the Chief Executive Officer of the AVH since 2015. He succeeded longtime CEO Tawfiq Nasser, who suddenly passed away in May 2015. Nammour is a Palestinian refugee himself who was born in the old city of Jerusalem. He trained in health and hospital management in Great Britain, the USA and France. He has headed health facilities for a quarter of a century and was also a senior advisor to the Palestinian Authority's first minister of health. Nammour had recently taken on the position of deputy head of the hospital.

The hospital currently (2016 annual report) has 118 inpatient and 52 outpatient treatment places and 403 employees. In 2016, 12,605 inpatients were admitted. The hospital performed 22,716 dialysis sessions, 20,088 chemotherapy sessions, and 25,585 radiation therapy treatments during the year.

Due to the lack of payments from the Palestinian Authority for treatments, the hospital ran into acute liquidity problems on several occasions. In 2016, the crisis reached a point where the hospital had to turn away patients. In early 2017, the United States made available US $ 11 million, which covered approximately one third of the Palestinian debt. In October 2017, Elizabeth Eaton , the chief bishop of the ELCA , appealed to the Palestinian ambassador to the United States, Husam S. Zomlot, to make payments, otherwise operations could no longer be carried out except for life-saving measures.

Augusta Victoria Compound

On the grounds of the Auguste Victoria Foundation (Augusta Victoria Compound) there is now the Evangelical Pilgrimage and Meeting Center of the Assumption Church with a public café next to the hospital. There is a kindergarten and a guest house. The German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies of the Holy Land has also had its seat there since 1982.

Foundation, endowment

The current 20 hectare compound is owned by the Empress Auguste Victoria Foundation on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem ( Mount of Olives Foundation ), which is currently based in Hanover. It is an ecclesiastical foundation with legal capacity within the meaning of Section 20 of the Lower Saxony Foundation Act and is managed by a board of trustees, which is chaired by the respective council chairman of the Evangelical Church in Germany .

Web links

Commons : Augusta Victoria  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • August Strobel : The hand of the Lord on the mountain. Texts on the history of the Empress Auguste Victoria Foundation. Collected and compiled on the occasion of the rededication of the Evangelical Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem on May 24, 1990 , Fürth: Flacius-Verlag 1992 ISBN 3-924022-98-4
  • Jürgen Krüger: The Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem , Königstein i. Ts. 2010 (The Blue Books), ISBN 978-3-7845-0720-0
  • Andreas Jüttemann : Brandenburg hospital history in Jerusalem. Projects of the Auguste Viktoria Foundation . Brandenburgisches Ärzteblatt 2015; 7-8: 30-31.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ Biography at www.ekd.de ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ekd.de
  3. ↑ [2]
  4. ↑ [3]
  5. ↑ [4]
  6. ↑ [5]
  7. ↑ [6]
  8. ^ LWF's Augusta Victoria Hospital receives US funding , notification dated February 3, 2017, accessed on October 25, 2017
  9. ^ Letter from Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton to Ambassador Husam S. Zomlot, Chief Representative of the PLO General Delegation to the United States, dated October 13, 2017, retrieved October 25, 2017
  10. ^ Statutes of the Empress Auguste Victoria Foundation of April 27, 2012

Coordinates: 31 ° 47 ′ 12.2 "  N , 35 ° 14 ′ 57.7"  E