Mexican Fuchsman Family Pledges NIS 200 Million for New Tel Aviv Rehabilitation Hospital

The Fuchsman family foundation has announced a donation of NIS 200 million for a new rehabilitation hospital at Sde Dov in Tel Aviv, which will be owned by the Reuth Association and replace the current Reuth hospital in Yad Eliyahu. As a result of the gift, the hospital will be named after the Fuchsman family.

The donation helps launch an ambitious project whose total cost is estimated at about $390 million, or NIS 1.14 billion. Reuth will exchange its Yad Eliyahu land with Tel Aviv Municipality for the Sde Dov site, while the city is expected to provide additional budget support. The Health Ministry is expected to contribute hundreds of millions of shekels, and the rest is to come from further donations and commercial activity on the hospital campus.

Reuth now also runs public housing, and that will be part of the new development as well, with 250 housing units. The complex is also expected to include shops, a health fund branch, private medical services, wellness and therapeutic activity, parking, and a technology incubator focused on rehabilitation technologies. Construction is expected to finish in about six years.

The hospital, which is run by Dr. Orit Stein-Reisner, is slated to expand from about 350 beds to 540. Its imaging department will be enlarged and a therapeutic pool will be built, which may later be opened to the general public. Dr. Hila Oren, CEO of the Tel Aviv Foundation and a project partner, said the aim is to build it as an open hospital without fences, using a “salutogenic” design approach that takes into account the link between architecture and health. She added that the hospital will be fortified, unlike today, when some patients had to be moved during the war to the protected parking garage at Sheba.

The Fuchsman family has made many earlier donations to Israeli institutions, including the imaging unit at Beilinson Hospital, the Yad Sarah building in Beersheba, education and welfare projects, the emergency center at Neve Michael boarding school in Pardes Hanna, Reichman University’s conference center, and Sheba’s oncology hospital. Most of those gifts were worth millions of shekels, but this one is unusually large even for the family. At the head of the family is Daniel Fuchsman, 91, a Jewish businessman born in Mexico to immigrants from the Soviet Union, and one of the country’s wealthiest people thanks to the Trooper tools company.