![]() ![]() Yet in addition to saving preemies, he stuck his neck out to get Jews out of Germany in the late 1930s - writing affidavits and sending money first for his niece and nephew, but then for others who were strangers. Martin Couney was not observant in any traditional way. ![]() How does Jewish teaching guide us when we have to make decisions about when/whether the ends justify the means? What does the Torah teach us about complicated men and women? Some of the roughly 7, 000 people whose lives he saved are still alive (the oldest is ninety-eight), as are their thousands of descendants. ![]() He saved preemies by the thousands when “real” hospitals could not and would not do it. And yet…despite his complete lack of medical training and his wildly unorthodox “hospital,” he was decades ahead of the American medical establishment. Outrageously, he hired barkers and charged admission to view his patients. ![]() He then fabricated impressive French medical credentials and set about treating premature infants in incubator sideshows on the boardwalks of places like Coney Island. He began by changing his name to sound not-Jewish (pretty much standard for Jewish showmen of the early twentieth Century). Martin Arthur Couney of France” (born Michael Cohn of Poland) was an extremely complicated man. ![]()
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