Both of his parents were born in Warsaw and came to France after the universities in Poland started limiting the number of Jews allowed to study at academic institutions. His mother, Rina, was a doctor and his father, Josef, was an agronomist “Since my parents couldn’t get into the university in Warsaw, they had to leave to study in France,” he says. “They came to the city of Nancy. There my father shared a room with two roommates: Yisrael Barzilai, who later became health minister [of Israel], and another fellow by the name of Natan Alterman. Alterman also studied agronomy. This trio became the closest of friends.”
When his parents finished their studies they moved to Paris, but they subsequently had to leave there as well. Right after the outbreak of World War II, Josef wisely realized that the future did not look good and decided to move his family to a farm in Dordogne, in the center of the country. They bought a farm in a small village of 18 houses, far from any industrial areas, roads or train tracks. “We lived on the farm throughout the war and we didn’t lack for anything. My petit bourgeois parents rolled up their sleeves and became real farmers,” says Walden. “They raised cattle and chickens, plowed and planted. That is the place where I was born and where I lived until the age of three.”
Despite the relative comfort of life on the isolated farm, the Walden family had to live in secret. “Our big secret was our Jewishness,” he says. “We lived with false papers, with French names that wouldn’t give away that we were Jews. My grandfather, for example, a Pole who spoke French with a very heavy accent, had papers saying that he was deaf and mute. This was to avoid his accent giving him away if he were ever questioned. We tried to live a quiet life, even though my parents were very popular among the other farmers in the area because my mother was a doctor who took care of the sick for free and my father, the agronomist, gave free advice to anyone who needed it.”
One day, Walden recalls, this bucolic world was disturbed when a neighbor came running to the family in alarm. “It was after we’d been on the farm for almost a year,” he says. “A farmer from a nearby village came to our house, out of breath, and said to my parents: ‘Watch out, there’s a German patrol approaching the village.’ That’s when we understood that everybody around us knew that we were Jews, that it was an open secret. This scene, of someone coming to warn us about the Germans, was repeated a number of times. We always received warnings. Then we would leave the house and hide in the forest, waiting for the danger to pass.”
At the end of the war, the family returned to Paris. Walden’s father, who was to lose his life in a plane crash a few years later, was appointed as the Davar newspaper’s correspondent in the city. Walden recently found a few articles that his father published, including one piece written back in 1938 that especially spoke to him. “It was a piece about the Jewish refugees in France and the attempts to expel them,” he says. “The arguments against them were that they were taking jobs, that they were foreigners, that the French had no obligation toward them and that they should be returned to the lands from whence they came. When I read the article I thought that if you just replaced the word “Jews” with “refugees from Darfur” you could publish it today in any newspaper in Israel.”
Prof. Raphi Walden, the personal physician ‏(and son-in-law‏) of President Shimon Peres, is a devoted activist who works with African refugees in Israel. Under the proposed Infiltration Prevention Bill, doctors like him would be subject to prison terms. Has Israeli society become indifferent to suffering?
Over the years, Walden, head of vascular surgery at Sheba, has become an activist dedicated to helping the refugees who live among us. “I came here [to Physicians for Human Rights] because of my respect for human beings, for their rights and dignity,” he says with deep feeling and no trace of self-satisfaction. “It was in the early 1990s. The Oslo Accords were in the background, it was an optimistic time, and still there was a very great need in the Palestinian sector for medical treatment. This is why I got involved in the organization. As part of my physician’s oath, I vowed to help people, and it doesn’t take any special effort to help only people who are in the same socioeconomic group as you are, or the people who come to your private practice. It is important to mobilize on behalf of people who aren’t even able to obtain the most basic medical rights.”
“This succession of bizarre decisions just goes to show that our approach is to completely disregard the suffering of others, who aren’t ‘one of ours,’” says Walden. “It’s not just abuse, it’s crude rejection. The sad thing is that we, as Jews, for centuries, experienced what it means to be refugees, to be terribly persecuted. More than once, we, too, knocked on the doors of other nations that could have helped us. But because we were different from then, they turned us away. So we accused the goyim of insensitivity, of cruelty and lack of human compassion. It pains me to see that now that we’re in a position of power, living in our sovereign state in an affluent society, we’re completely ignoring people who are suffering horribly. I think our behavior is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”
Isn’t that analogy a bit extreme?
“When Jewish refugees in World War II came to Switzerland’s border, they were turned away and sent back to Germany, to the death camps. Tens of thousands could have been saved if they’d been allowed in. So yes, it’s a harsh analogy and I don’t mean to exaggerate, but it’s sad that we’re behaving with total indifference to people who are in a similar situation.
“No one is saying these people should be given the same health services that people in Ramat Aviv Gimmel are getting. I’m talking about the most basic medical care, about care for pregnant women, vaccinations for children, basic family medicine, basic lab tests.”
Human solidarity
To understand the depth of Walden’s emotional turmoil, one has to know his family history. He was born in France, in the Dordogne region, to a middle-class Zionist family. His mother, Rina, was a doctor and his father, Josef, was an agronomist. Both parents were born in Warsaw and came to France after the universities in Poland started limiting the number of Jews allowed to study at academic institutions.
“Since my parents couldn’t get into the university in Warsaw, they had to leave to study in France,” he says. “They came to the city of Nancy. There my father shared a room with two roommates: Yisrael Barzilai, who later became health minister [of Israel], and another fellow by the name of Natan Alterman. Alterman also studied agronomy. This trio became the closest of friends.”
When his parents finished their studies they moved to Paris, but they subsequently had to leave there as well. Right after the outbreak of World War II, Josef wisely realized that the future did not look good and decided to move his family to a farm in Dordogne, in the center of the country. They bought a farm in a small village of 18 houses, far from any industrial areas, roads or train tracks. “We lived on the farm throughout the war and we didn’t lack for anything. My petit bourgeois parents rolled up their sleeves and became real farmers,” says Walden. “They raised cattle and chickens, plowed and planted. That is the place where I was born and where I lived until the age of three.”
Despite the relative comfort of life on the isolated farm, the Walden family had to live in secret. “Our big secret was our Jewishness,” he says. “We lived with false papers, with French names that wouldn’t give away that we were Jews. My grandfather, for example, a Pole who spoke French with a very heavy accent, had papers saying that he was deaf and mute. This was to avoid his accent giving him away if he were ever questioned. We tried to live a quiet life, even though my parents were very popular among the other farmers in the area because my mother was a doctor who took care of the sick for free and my father, the agronomist, gave free advice to anyone who needed it.”
One day, Walden recalls, this bucolic world was disturbed when a neighbor came running to the family in alarm. “It was after we’d been on the farm for almost a year,” he says. “A farmer from a nearby village came to our house, out of breath, and said to my parents: ‘Watch out, there’s a German patrol approaching the village.’ That’s when we understood that everybody around us knew that we were Jews, that it was an open secret. This scene, of someone coming to warn us about the Germans, was repeated a number of times. We always received warnings. Then we would leave the house and hide in the forest, waiting for the danger to pass.”
At the end of the war, the family returned to Paris. Walden’s father, who was to lose his life in a plane crash a few years later, was appointed as the Davar newspaper’s correspondent in the city. Walden recently found a few articles that his father published, including one piece written back in 1938 that especially spoke to him. “It was a piece about the Jewish refugees in France and the attempts to expel them,” he says. “The arguments against them were that they were taking jobs, that they were foreigners, that the French had no obligation toward them and that they should be returned to the lands from whence they came. When I read the article I thought that if you just replaced the word “Jews” with “refugees from Darfur” you could publish it today in any newspaper in Israel.”
Coming from a family that went through its own refugee experience, a family that was saved because of a protective community, has much to do with his commitment to helping the refugees. “I believe that it’s because of human solidarity that my family and I survived. People who had no obligation to us saved us. We were strangers there. Even though they knew very little about Judaism, even though all they knew about Jews were some unflattering things from the New Testament, it didn’t stop them and they felt it was right to help us. Because of them we lived. All of our relatives who remained in Poland, a huge family, they all perished, every last one. My family’s refugee experience has played a very substantial part in shaping me as a person.”
Young volunteer
As evening falls, he describes how in 1951, when he was nine, the family came to Israel, moving into a place on Sderot Chen in Tel Aviv.
As a teen, he already displayed an affinity for social justice. He volunteered for the Noar L’noar ‏(Youth for Youth‏) organization that worked in impoverished areas. After serving as organization chairman and graduating from high school, he began studying medicine at the Hebrew University, deferring his army service. There, too, he continued his activism and became the first Israeli elected president of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations. In September 1964, his election to a second term was covered in the news pages of Haaretz: “For the first time since the organization’s founding, a student has been elected twice as president. This is only the second time that a student from a non-European country was elected, and both times it was an Israeli, despite strong propaganda against him from Arab, German and Austrian students and students from Communist bloc countries.”
When he finished his studies, Walden enlisted in the army as a doctor in the paratroop brigade. He met his wife, Dr. Tzvia Walden, linguist and daughter of Shimon Peres, around that time. “I met her when she was a student in Jerusalem and I was a young doctor at Tel Hashomer,” he relates. “We got married on September 5, 1973 and the Saturday after the wedding the Yom Kippur War broke out. We had planned to honeymoon in Spain and Portugal, but we ended up celebrating it apart. We didn’t see each other for four months.
Shimon Peres, who was transportation minister at the time, immediately made his new son-in-law his personal physician. “I’ve been with him ever since, for more than 37 years,” says Walden. “It’s very natural. When you have a son-in-law who’s a doctor, why go to someone else? It wasn’t a formal appointment, and basically, I’m blessed to be unemployed, because Israel’s president is an extraordinarily healthy man. My job is more on the level of supervision, routine exams and accompanying him on some of his trips abroad. I’m happy to say that he doesn’t need my good services.”
There was that time about six months ago when Peres fainted and lost consciousness. Didn’t that worry you?
“There was concern, of course. But the circumstances were difficult. That day he was dressed warmly, stood for a whole hour and gave a speech, didn’t drink, the spotlights were right on him. His blood pressure dropped for a moment and he fell. He lost consciousness for a few seconds but immediately came to. I got to him within minutes. I was at a concert in Tel Aviv, it was intermission. I got there and assessed his condition and saw that he was basically fine. Still, since he’s not a young man, I took him to Tel Hashomer for observation until the next morning.”
Don’t you sometimes feel that one could expect the president to make his voice heard on the refugee issue? The Israeli public listens to him. Don’t you think he could help to open up closed hearts?
“I can say that he does get involved in the refugee issue, without creating publicity about it. He maintains a low profile in certain areas, even though he is very often involved in humanitarian issues.”

Prof. Raphi Walden Awarded the French Legion of Honor

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (right) embraces his friend
Prof. Raphi Walden of Sheba at the Legion of Honor award ceremony. 

 
The Republic of France recently awarded its highest honor, the Legion of Honor Award, to Prof. Raphael Walden, a Deputy Director of the Sheba Medical Center. Prof. Walden received the prestigious award in recognition of his leadership in the Israeli NGO, Physicians for Human Rights, and for his concrete contribution to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.
 
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a close friend of Prof. Walden's, personally insisted on bestowing the "Officer of the Legion" award himself, during Kouchner's November visit to Israel. Kouchner himself was one of the founders of the international NGO, Doctors without Borders.
 
Mr. Shimon Peres, President of the State of Israel, participated in the ceremony which was held at the French ambassador's residence in Jaffa. Prof. Walden is personal physician to Mr. Peres, while Peres is Walden's father-in-law. Former Israeli deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin was also similarly awarded at the recent ceremony.
 
Prof. Walden is a vascular surgeon who for years was chief of surgery at Sheba. He is a professor at Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine, and has been a visiting professor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. He joined Physicians for Human Rights in 1992 and been one of its leaders ever since.

aphael Walden (born in 1942 ) is an Israeli physician and professor of medicine , teaches at Tel Aviv University , deputy director of the Sheba Medical Center and a social activist . Specialist in general surgery and blood vessels . Dan 's parents emigrated from Warsaw to France , after the quota policy prevented them from higher education in their homeland . Rina mother was a doctor and his father Joseph agronomist . Walden was born in 1942 in a small village in the Dordogne region , where the family lived under a false identity , during World War II . After the war, the family returned to Paris. At the age of nine moved with his family to Israel and lived in Tel Aviv. Served as chairman of the youth organization for youth. Studied medicine at the Hebrew University in the academic reserve . During his twice elected President of the International Medical Students . Served as a doctor after graduating paratrooper , reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel. Served as director of the Department of Surgery and director of the Vascular Hospital Sheba . Walden activist and member of the Management Association " Doctors for Human Rights " , in which he provides medical care to Palestinians , refugees and asylum seekers in Israel ( that is running in the spirit of his father , who wrote in 1938 about refugees coming to France : "It is impossible to keep people fleeing from their homes political persecution or economic and have no choice but to " [ 1 ] ) . Was awarded the French Legion of Honor ( Légion d' Honneur ) from the French government for his part " PHR " promote cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis . Signal was presented to him by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner at the French embassy in Tel Aviv. Walden was also a member of the management organization to "give" Edited several books on human rights published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers . Articles in the book " For the Sake of Humanity : Essays in Honour of Clemens N. Nathan ," in honor of Clemens Nathan. In October 1973, he married linguist Tzvia Walden , daughter of Shimon Peres. The next marriage Yom Kippur War broke out , Walden was drafted for four months . It also serves as physician to the reward. Books [Edit | Edit Source Code ]
For The Sake of Humanity : Essays in Honour of Clemens N. Nathan, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006, editor Does God Believe in Human Rights?: Essays on Religion and Human Rights, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007, editor Racism and human rights, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004, editor
Personal Page of Sheba Hospital site . Kobi Ben - Simhon , what bothers Professor Rafi Walden , his personal physician in-law of the president ? Situation of African refugees , on the country, 25 June 2010 Ayelet hand, I call - Rafi Walden accuses the Israeli government in fostering Holocaust neurosis , on Earth , April 19, 2013 Footnotes
Renee Walden was born in Varsovie, Poland in 1911. She was a docteur en medecine and a widow. Prior to WWII she lived in Paris, France. 

This information is based on a List of persecuted persons found in Service Européen de Recherches (SER– European Search Service) card catalogue from France for searching for relatives, 1940-1946.
Khaia Grinhauz nee Rozenblum was born in Warsza, Poland to Yisrael Wolf. Prior to WWII she lived in Warsza, Poland. During the war she was in Warsza, Poland.

Khaia was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her niece Dr. Rina Walden of Tel Aviv.
.

Arie Walden was born in Warszawa, Poland in 1903 to Moshe and Lea. He was a clerk. During the war he was in Warszawa, Poland. left) submitted by his brother-in-law.
Last Name:
Walden
First Name:
Joseph
Gender:
Male
Date of Birth:
02/06/1810
Place of Birth:
Varsovie,Warszawa,Warszawa,Poland   
Status in the source:
person being sought after as missing
Source:
Service Européen de Recherches (SER– European Search Service) card catalogue from France for searching for relatives, 1940-1946
Type of material:
List of persecuted persons
Item ID:
8395027 
Arie was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed onHana Walden nee ?????? was born in Warszawa, Poland to Yosef and Fritza. She was married Menakhem. Prior to WWII she lived in Warszawa, Poland. During the war she was in Warszawa, Poland.

Hana was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left). by Yehuda Walden

Bela Walden was born in Warszawa, Poland in 1906 to Menakhem and Gita. She was a grocer. Prior to WWII she lived in Warszawa, Poland. During the war she was in Warsza, Poland.

Bela was murdered in the Shoah. report by Yehuda Walden of Kiryat Borochov.

Ester Dorn nee Valden was born in Warszawa, Poland in 1884 to Yosef and Hinda. Prior to WWII she lived in Warszawa, Poland. During the war she was in Otwock, Poland.

Ester was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her daughter Yocheved Lubskind of Tel Aviv..

Khaia Dorn was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920 to Efraim and Ester. Prior to WWII she lived in Warsaw, Poland. During the war she was in Otwock, Poland.

Khaia was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her sister.

Rounia Sudowicz nee Rozenblum was born in Warszawa, Poland in 1909 to Aharon and Tova. She was a housewife and married Lucian. Prior to WWII she lived in Warszawa, Poland. During the war she was in Warszawa, Poland.

Rounia was murdered in the Shoah. 

This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted by her sister Rina Walden.