PRYWES, MOSHE (1914–1998), Israeli physician and medical educator, born in Warsaw, Poland, to a distinguished Jewish family. He studied medicine at the University of Tours, France, from 1931 to 1933 and at the University of Warsaw from 1933 to 1939. In 1939 he was mobilized into the Polish army as a medical officer and from 1940 to 1945 was a prisoner in the U.S.S.R. As a prisoner, he became the medical director of a 350–bed hospital. From 1945 to 1946, he was head of surgery in the Kherson hospital in Ukraine and later became a chief assistant in the department of surgery, University Hospital, Gdansk, Poland. In Paris, from 1947 to 1951, he headed the medical services of the Union OSE, international Jewish medical organization, and organized preventive and curative services for Jewish communities in Europe, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. He immigrated to Israel in 1951, joined the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School as assistant dean and later became associate dean (1955), and associate professor and head of the department of medical education in 1965. In 1968, he was appointed vice president, resigning in 1973 to take up his appointment as president of the University of the Negev (now the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), to devote himself to acting as dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences of the university, as well as director of Health Services for the Negev region on behalf of both Kuppat Ḥolim and the Ministry of Health. Prywes was a delegate to the World Conference on Medical Education and a member of the World Health Organization's Advisory Board on Medical Research. He was chairman of the scientific subcommittee of the France-Israel Cultural Agreement, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government for his work in this capacity. He served as editor-in-chief of the Israel Journal of Medical Sciences, and edited a number of works, including Medical and Biological Research in Israel (1960), Health Problems in Developing States (1968; with A.M. Davies), and Topics in Basic Immunology (1969; with M. Sela). He was elected senior member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, U.S., 1983, and in 1990, Prywes received the Israel Prize in life sciences for his pioneering work in medical education. In 1995 he was awarded the Ben-Gurion Foundation's Ben Gurion prize.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

Moshe Prywes