Amram Cohen; Surgeon Saved Lives of Many Poor Children

Dr. Amram Cohen, an American-born heart surgeon who helped bring about 700 children from poor countries to Israel for lifesaving operations, has died while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. He was 47.

Cohen, who had joint Israeli-U.S. citizenship, was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with his daughter, Tali, when he became ill. Despite efforts to resuscitate him, Cohen died Thursday of complications from altitude sickness, his Save a Child’s Heart foundation said.

Previously a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Medical Corps, Cohen became interested in aiding children with congenital heart defects when he was stationed in South Korea in 1988. Asked by an American expatriate for help, Cohen performed 35 heart operations on Korean children during his Army stint there.

He later served in the Gulf region during the 1991 Gulf War, when the U.S.-led forces drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, once writing on a bomb attached to a U.S. jet fighter: “To Saddam Hussein, from the residents of Tel Aviv.”

After Cohen immigrated with his family to Israel from the United States in 1992, he was asked by an Ethiopian doctor to perform cardiac surgery on two needy Ethiopian children.

That request led to Cohen’s 1995 creation of the Save a Child’s Heart foundation. Cohen, head of the pediatric cardiology unit at the Wolfson Medical Center south of Tel Aviv, and his foundation have brought hundreds of poor children with congenital heart diseases to Israel for surgery and sent Israeli doctors to perform pediatric heart surgery in developing countries.

The group also supplies drugs and equipment for screening and post-surgical follow-up, and trains medical personnel in developing nations to establish their own pediatric care units.

“If you get to these children on time, most of them can be cured with a relatively simple 15-minute operation,” Cohen once told the Jerusalem Post. “But if you don’t, the condition can be irreversible, and then you’re talking about a child who will probably die by age 10 or 12.”

The organization has aided children from Ethiopia, Ghana, Vietnam, Jordan, Moldova, Nigeria and Russia. Last September, Cohen worked with Israeli filmmaker David Ehrlich on a documentary about the project.

In addition to his daughter, Cohen is survived by his wife, Debby, and a son, Nadav.