Even at the tender age of 72, Dr. Rapoport was inspiring young people
The Wall Street Journal has an amazing piece on Ingeborg Rapoport, a 102-year-old neonatologist from Berlin (retired). In 1938, she was a 25-year-old student at the University of Hamburg.
She submitted her thesis on the deadly disease of diphtheria—a leading cause of childhood death back in 1938.
Ms. Rapoport’s professor, a one-time Nazi party member, praised her work, she recalled. But that wasn’t enough. “I was told I wasn’t permitted to take the oral examination,” she said.
Academic authorities in Berlin cited “racial reasons” for the ban: Ms. Rapoport, née Syllm, was raised as a Protestant. But her mother was Jewish, making her “a first-degree crossbreed” in Nazi parlance. Officials marked her exam forms with a telltale yellow stripe and deemed her ineligible for academic advancement.
Later that same year she left Germany.
In 1938, Ms. Rapoport, then named Ingeborg Syllm, emigrated penniless and alone to the U.S. She did hospital internships in Brooklyn, N.Y., Baltimore and Akron, Ohio. She applied to 48 medical schools and was accepted by one: the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
She met and married Samuel Mitja Rapoport, an Austrian-Jewish scientist and the two were married and began a very successful life in America. The Rapoports had three children shortly after their marriage and then, pregnant with their fourth child, left America for good. The Red Scare was afoot in America and Mr. Rapoport had ties to the
Daily Worker. Some things change and some stay the same,
unfortunately.
Feeling the heat, Mr. Rapoport remained in Zurich after a pediatric conference in 1950. Ms. Rapoport, pregnant with her fourth child, joined him in Europe with their children. He unsuccessfully sought a position at his alma mater, the University of Vienna, before the family moved to East Germany.
There Mr. Rapoport got his own biochemical institute, remaining active almost until his death in 2004. Ms. Rapoport founded the first neonatology clinic in either Germany at Berlin’s Charité Hospital and their children flourished.
In recent months a movement has been underway to allow Ms. Rapoport a real defense of her dissertation—not an honorary degree. Since her original paper could not be found and because there have been 77 years of advances in the science of diphtheria since her original thesis was written, Ms. Rapoport needed to get up to speed.
Her main practical obstacle has been her failing eyesight—she can’t read or use a computer. So she had relatives and biochemist friends trawl the Internet for the last seven decades of scientific advances in diphtheria studies and report back by phone.
[...]
On Wednesday Dr. Koch-Gromus and two other professors settled into the brown-and-orange furniture in Ms. Rapoport’s Berlin living room and drilled her for 45 minutes before approving her doctorate—nearly eight decades after she applied.
We know that the Nazis lost their bid to take away a large piece of our humanity and it is nice to see them continue to lose.