Yoel Har-Even

Origins and early life

Yoel Har-Even was born in 1971 into a family from western Ukraine: his mother and grandmother were born near the town of Mostyska, and he has spoken of what his family went through there in the Holocaust.

Work and career

He served 26 years in the Israel Defense Forces, among other roles as a combat paramedic and as assistant to the surgeon general, and took part in the army's field hospitals in Rwanda and the Balkans. He later earned a doctorate in business administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, with research on the performance of large health management systems. At Sheba Medical Center, Israel's largest hospital, he became director of the international division and resource development and head of Sheba Global, which carries out the hospital's medical diplomacy.

In March 2022, weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he led the Israeli mission that opened the 66-bed Shining Star field hospital in Mostyska, called Kochav Meir in Hebrew in honour of the Ukrainian-born Golda Meir. Run by Sheba with Israel's Health Ministry and the Clalit health fund, it treated more than 730 local people and refugees in its first five days, and more than 6,000 Ukrainians received care there that year.

On arrival he went with the Israeli delegation and the town's mayor to the Jewish cemetery to say Kaddish, and he said the team had a moral obligation not to look away “as human beings, as medical professionals, and as Jews”. Since the Abraham Accords he has welcomed medical delegations from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, and Sheba has signed more cooperation agreements with Gulf states than any other Israeli hospital.

The Algemeiner named him in 2022 among the hundred people positively influencing Jewish life, and the Jerusalem Post named him in 2023 among its fifty most influential Jews, an honour he called a vote of confidence in Sheba.