Moisés Behar

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Moisés Behar (born August 28, 1922 in Huehuetenango , Guatemala ; † February 14 , 2015 in Jerusalem , Israel ) was a Guatemalan pediatrician and hepatologist who worked at the Central American Nutritional Institute INCAP (Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá) from 1957 to 1974 and 1975 worked as head of the nutrition department at the World Health Organization in Geneva. His specialty was nutrition. He was also an expert on orchids .

Life

Moisés Behar Alcahe was born in Guatemala as the third of six children after his parents Ellas and Eugenia Behar emigrated from Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Moises grew up in the small village of San Pedro and went to the local elementary school there. He then attended high school in the neighboring town of Quetzaltenango . After graduating from high school and wanting to study medicine, Moises moved to Guatemala City. It was here that he graduated from the University of San Carlos as a surgeon and doctor in 1949 and married Beatriz Aldana in 1954, daughter of a well-known Guatemalan doctor and former health minister. Both had three children, born in 1955, 1957, and 1958.

medicine

Moisés Behar made a career in medicine. He specialized in pediatrics and hepatology at the University of Paris in 1951 and received a Masters in Public Health from Harvard University in 1960 . After serving as head of the General Directorate of Public Health from 1951 to 1953, he began his career as a pediatric consultant for the Institute of Nutrition in Central America and Panama INCAP (Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panamá), where he became Deputy Director in 1957 and was appointed director in 1961, a position he held until 1974.

In 1975 Moisés Behar moved to Geneva to take on the position of Head of Nutrition at the World Health Organization.

During his professional life, Moisés Behar held important positions. He was President of the Guatemalan Pediatric Society from 1956 to 1957, Vice President of the American Society of Public Health from 1966 to 1967, and in 1973 he became a full member of the Guatemalan Academy of Sciences.

He has published over 150 articles and books, mainly on child malnutrition, and gained international recognition for developing, designing, and testing INCAPARINA, a formula made from a blend of predominantly vegetable protein and made from purely local materials. It was developed to combat malnutrition among low-income people in Central America.

botany

Behar's childhood and youth in the pristine mountains of the highlands of Guatemala shaped his life and character and he developed a close relationship with nature. This sparked his interest in orchids early on. In 1960, on Behar's initiative, six friends who worked with orchids met regularly, and thirteen years later the Guatemalan Society for Orchideology (Asociacion Guatemalteca de Orquideologia or AGO) was officially founded by its eight founding members. Moisés Behar became the first president of this society. He dedicated himself particularly to the hybridization of orchids of the subtribe Pleurothalidiinae and became an internationally recognized expert. He also gained recognition for the photography of miniature orchids long before the advent of digital photo technology. His lectures on orchid photography were in great demand and presented them among others. a. 2000 in Soroa ( Cuba ) and 2001 in San Jose ( Costa Rica ).

When he moved to Switzerland in 1975, Behar had to leave his large orchid collection behind in Guatemala. That's why he built up a new breed there. He became Vice President of the Swiss Society for Orchidology (Groupe de Romandie), which left behind all of his plants when he returned to Guatemala in 1986. Behar dedicated two of his many new breeds of miniature orchids to his daughters: Lepanthopsis Michelle and Pleurothallis Jacqueline. Together with his friend and botanist Dr. Carlyle Luer described 23 new orchids to Behar, all of them from her favorite species, Pleurothalidiinae . In addition, Carlyle Luer described another new species of Lepanthes from Guatemala and named it Lepanthes beharii in honor of his friend.

Together with his friend Otto Tinschert (1915-2006), Moisés Behar tried to set in motion a large-scale orchid protection project in Peten, a northern department in Guatemala. The civil war between left groups and the Guatemalan army threatened orchid populations in the forests. In order to save them, Behar and Tinschert tried to convince the timber industry to save the orchids from the large deforested forest areas and to replant them in other areas. Unfortunately, the project did not attract enough interest and it failed. Disappointed by the tragic situation of deforestation in Guatemala and with little hope of being able to stop it, Behar and Tinschert, together with a small group of interested friends, got involved in the creation of a national botanical garden in Guatemala.

After living with his daughter Michelle in Brazil for a few years, Moisés Behar moved with his daughter Jacqueline to Jerusalem in the last years of his life, where he died on February 14, 2015 at the age of 92. He was buried in Jerusalem in the Mount of Olives Cemetery .

Awards

  • 1968: Bronfman Prize from the American Society for Public Health
  • 1994: Awarded the Order of Rodolfo Robles by the government of Guatemala
  • 2007: Awarded the National Order of Pedro de San Jose de Bethancourt

Fonts

  • with Marcel Autret : Le Syndrome de polycarence de l'enfance et amérique centrale (kwashiorkor) , Organization des Nations Unies pour l'Alimentation et l'Agriculture, Rome 1955
  • Vitamins, nutrient requirements, and food selection , Acad. Press, 1964
  • La incaparina . INCAP publication. 1964. 14 pp.
  • with Fernando Viteri / Jorge Alvarado : El problema de la desnutrición proteínico-calórica en el istmo centroamericano . Nº 7 de Publicaciones científicas. 1971, 113 pp.
  • with Ricardo Bressani : Recursos proteínicos en América Latina: memorias de una conferencia de nivel latinoamericano celebrada en el Instituto de Nutrición de Centro América y Panamá (INCAP) , ciudad de Guatemala, del 24 al 27 de febrero de 1970. Ed. INCAP. 1971. 507 pp.
  • with Nevin S. Scrimshaw (Ed.): Nutrition and agricultural development: significance and potential for the tropics (proceedings of the Fourteenth International Biological Symposium, held in Guatemala City, Guatemala, December 2-6, 1974) , Plenum Press, 1976, ISBN 9780306365072
  • La ecología del subdesarrollo . Selecciones de población. Ed. Population Reference Bureau. 1976. 10 pp.
  • Orchids of Guatemala . ICONOS, The Guatemalan Orchid Society, 1993
  • with Otto Tinschert : Guatemala y sus Orquideas / Guatemala and its Orchids . Guatemala Ciudad: MayaPrin / Trade Litho, 1998, 240 pages with CDROM
  • with Otto Tinschert: Guatemala y sus Orquideas / Guatemala and its Orchids . Guatemala City: Bancafé, bilingual edition Spanish / English, with CDROM

literature

  • Christiane Berth: “El Maíz, Nuestra Raíz.” Los debates sobre la independencia alimentaria en Centroamérica. Centroamericana 22.1 / 2, 2012, pp. 21-49 ( online ).
  • Corinne A. Pernet: Between Entanglements and Dependencies: Food, Nutrition, and National Development at the Central American Institute of Nutrition (INCAP). In: Sönke Kunkel, Corinna Unger, Marc Frey (eds.): International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 101-125. ( online )
  • Corinne A. Pernet, Christiane Berth: Diet as a way to modernization? Knowledge transfer, experts and their scope of action in Central America, 1949–1990. In: Daniel Speich Chassé , Hubertus Büschel (Ed.): Development work and global modernization expertise. Special issue history and society. 41, 4, 2015, 613-648.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Carlos Ossenbach: Moisés Behar at scielo.sa.cr, accessed on August 19, 2019.
  2. ↑ Julio Hernández Estrada: Fallace Moisés Behar, orto de los padres de la Incaparina. Obituary on lanacion.com.gt of February 17, 2015 (accessed in Spanish on March 17, 2015).
  3. ↑ Dr. Moisé's Béhar Blog at incap.int, accessed on August 19, 2019.
  4. ↑ Moisés Behar (born 1922) at earninglab.si, accessed on August 19, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Behar, Moisés
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Behar, Moisés; Béhar, Moises
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Guatemalan doctor and orchid expert
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Huehuetenango , Guatemala
DATE OF DEATH February 2015
Place of death Israel