Visionaries from Lviv

Year 2023 marks 120 years of the Lazarus Jewish Hospital in Lviv. The richly illustrated book Visionaries from Lviv: The Story of a Jewish Hospital is a tribute to its place in once vibrant Jewish community of the city and in the society at large during the period 1903-1939. The book presents hospital’s history and its architecture, its doctors, and its founder, Maurycy Lazarus, with the background of the Jewish life in Galicia at the time, and especially in Lviv. It also describes what preceded it - the state of medicine and medical education in Habsburg Galicia, Jewish access to the medical profession, as well as progress of women in general, and Jewish women in particular, in their quest to become medical doctors. Maurycy Lazarus’s social, political, and philantropic activities are depicted using both publicly available and family records. The lives of his children, so different from his own, represent choices the young people were facing at the turn of the twentieth century.