Meet an alumna - Dr. Marta Elian
Dr. Marta Elian, who prefers to keep us guessing how young she is, has been living in London for 30 years. She is a proud alumna and a great supporter of the British Friends of the Hebrew U. She has two sons, twins, who were born during her medical studies at the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and three teenage grandchildren who all live in Israel. She works from home and advises on medical matters, as well as acting as an expert witness and writing medical legal reports for the court. She specialises in Neurology.
She was born close to the border between Hungary and Romania and speaks six (“and a half”) languages - English, Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, German, French and some Italian. She made Aliya in 1949, having already studied one year of medicine in Hungary.
When Dr. Elian came to Israel there was no place to study medicine so she had to wait a few years until her class would open. “The Faculty of Medicine in Jerusalem had a unique beginning –first they opened only the fifth year (the last year), then the fourth, the third and so on. It took five years to have the first year started in Jerusalem, so I had to wait.” Her husband, Dr. Ezra Elian, received medical diploma number three from the Faculty of Medicine – having studied medicine in Romania and Hungary, he needed to attend only the fifth year.
“It was not easy to study medicine in those days” she said. “For example, there was a big problem in anatomy - we had a complete absence of corpses to dissect, because we couldn't study on a Jewish body. We were 12 students around one body, which is a lot!” she remembers.
“There was serious competition, between the "locals" and the newcomers. The locals thought they were better than us, because they were "Sabras”, and not from the Galut.
The language was an obstacle – the lectures were in Hebrew and at the beginning Marta didn’t understand a word. “I understood the medical terms, in Latin, but not the whole lecture. Fortunately, the reading material was mostly in English and there were teachers whose first language wasn’t Hebrew so they allowed us to write the exams and papers in their mother tongue - I was lucky to have a professor who originally came from Hungary since Hungarian is my mother tongue”.
“I remember that the level of studies was high and the University was well known around the world - which gave me a lot of confidence.”
A few years ago Marta’s class had a reunion in Israel. “Out of 50 students who studied together, nearly half participated” she says. “We were not in touch but it was nice to meet again after so many years. The pictures showed and the stories told were really exciting.”
And what about the future? “I’ll go back to live in Israel when I old,” she says.
Print this page 
Send to a friend 