A Beloved Doctor without Frontiers 

​

Haim Ring was born in Montevideo, where he attended his first year of medical school. He immigrated to Israel in 1963 and after studying Hebrew at the ulpan on Kibbutz Ruhama, he served in the Israel Defense Forces. Then he returned to Uruguay to finish his medical studies. In 1973, he returned to Israel and after completing his internship at the Meir Hospital in Kfar Sava, he joined the staff of the Loewenstein Hospital Rehabilitation Center in Ra'anana, where he specialized in rehabilitative medicine.

At the time, Israel had just passed a general disability law, which granted benefits to disabled persons even if they had not been injured at work. Ring developed a model for the National Insurance Institute that made it possible to complete a general medical assessment of an individual within a day. It was on the basis of this model that the institute for functional evaluation was set up, which came up with uniform standards for defining the percentage of medical disability, the handicap and rehabilitation.

As director of the hospital's department for neurological rehabilitation, where patients are treated after suffering a stroke, Ring introduced the first tools for assessing disability and was involved also in the technological aspects of the research. One of his internationally acclaimed research projects was a study, undertaken with with Dr. Jeffrey Hausdorff of Harvard University in which they demonstrated dramatic improvement in the ability to walk of people suffering from foot paralysis following stroke. The improvement was achieved via use of a tiny, wireless digital instrument that produces neural stimuli to take the place of those no longer coming from the affected brain.
Prof. Ring succeeded in realizing many of his ambitions. He was the head of a department, a professor at Tel Aviv University, chair of the National Rehabilitation Council, and president of the European Federation of Research in Rehabilitation. In addition, he was the author of dozens of articles, and he organized and lectured at international conferences.

Ring was described by his colleague Dr. Salvatore Giaquinto, of the San Raffaele Pisana rehabilitation center in Rome, as "a man of rehabilitation without frontiers." Giaquinto noted that that when Ring established a Mediterranean rehabilitation organization, representatives from all the other Mediterranean countries came to the opening session. In an interview with Bat Ami Melnick, who edited the Beit Loewenstein jubilee year book, Ring said that in 2002, when he was unanimously elected president of the International Society of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, representatives of the Arab countries gave him their wholehearted support.

Prof. Yaakov Hart, the director of Beit Loewenstein, says that "beyond his degrees and his uncompromising professionalism in the field of rehabilitation, Prof. Ring was one of the best loved and most esteemed figures at the hospital. He could always be seen smiling in the corridors and the wards, and he demonstrated tolerance and kindness toward each and every patients, their families and the employees around him."
In a cruel twist of fate, this brilliant neurologist died of a rare neurological illness. He is survived by his wife, Irene, and his children Edan, Shani and Matan.
    
Uri Dromi
Haaretz, 7/10/2008