The Rebbe’s Cardiologist Who Pioneered the Defibrillator

New information has emerged about Dr. Bernard Lown, who helped spearhead the effort to assemble a coronary care unit in the Rebbe’s room, alongside Dr. Ira Weiss and Dr. Louis Teichholz. The Rebbe’s recovery was later declared a clear miracle by the three skilled physicians.

An excerpt from an article on Chabad.org By Dovid Margolin

Shemini Atzeret, 1977

Just a few days earlier, everything had appeared fine. After davening on the morning of Hoshana Rabbah, Oct. 4, 1977, the Rebbe, 75-years-old at the time, stood for hours at the door of his sukkah distributing lekach (honey cake) to those who had not had the opportunity to receive it before Yom Kippur. Shemini Atzeret, one of the most joyous holidays of the year, would begin that evening, followed the next night by Simchas Torah. The Rebbe’s joy and vitality during this holiday was transcendent, and the resulting exuberant atmosphere in his 770, palpable.

Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, however, knew that something was amiss. That morning the Rebbetzin rang the Rebbe’s secretariat saying her husband did not feel well and asking they attempt to lighten the Rebbe’s schedule.

The first three Hakafos went off without a hitch. Then came the fourth hakafah, when the Rebbe’s face suddenly turned white. First resting on his Shtender, then sitting down on his chair, leaning back and closing his eyes, the sudden change threw the crowd into chaos. People began rushing out of 770 to allow in fresh air, and windows were smashed open. Still, the Rebbe insisted on completing the Hakafos. Returning to his room, the Rebbe refused to eat or drink anything until going out to the Sukkah to make kiddush on wine.

After the doctors onsite provided the Rebbe with immediate medical care, Rabbi Krinsky called the chief surgeon of a nearby hospital, who arrived and made a cardiogram; the reading was abysmal, and the doctor said there was no choice but for the Rebbe to go to a hospital. But the Rebbe dismissed the idea, saying he would only be treated in 770.

As the hours ticked by, a procession of cardiologists came and went, each confirming that the Rebbe had suffered a major heart incident and needed to be in a hospital. Sometime in the early hours of the morning the Rebbe had a second, more extensive heart attack. At around 6 a.m. the Rebbetzin came over to Rabbi Krinsky and asked for an update. He responded that the situation was dire and some of the doctors were insisting the Rebbe be taken to the hospital.

Telling the story over years later, Rabbi Krinsky would recall the sheer strength the Rebbetzin demonstrated at that moment. An intensely private person, the Rebbetzin had dedicated her whole life to supporting her husband in a way no one else could. Now, standing to lose all she had, she maintained that the Rebbe’s wishes be adhered to. “All my life that I know my husband, never for an instant was he not in total control of himself,” she told Rabbi Krinsky. “I cannot allow the doctors to” go against the Rebbe’s will.

A moment later she turned back to him. “Rabbi Krinsky, you know so many people, you can’t find a doctor for my husband?”

That’s when, all of a sudden, things began to come together. Like a flash, He remembered a book on heart rhythm analysis he had seen on the Rebbe’s desk a few months earlier sent to the Rebbe by Krinsky’s brother-in-law in Chicago, Rabbi Herschel Shusterman. The book was written by a brilliant young cardiologist named Ira Weiss, a former congregant and Hebrew school student of Shusterman’s.

Building a Coronary Care Unit

It was early morning when Dr. Weiss got Rabbi Krinsky’s desperate call describing the severity of the situation. The Rebbe, he explained, had not rejected medical care, but wanted it to take place in 770 itself, a position backed by the Rebbetzin. Rabbi Krinsky wanted to know whether this was possible.

“I’d known about the Rebbe from when I was a little cheder student in the 1950s in Chicago,” Dr. Weiss explained to me. “We were not from the kind of household that were Chassidim … but I had at least the wherewithal to know that one does not trample on the things the Rebbe wants to do. On the other hand, you’re obliged as a doctor to do whatever you need to do, even if the patient tells you otherwise if there’s only one way to save him.”

Though young, Weiss was already acclaimed in his field. In 1967, at the age of 23, he graduated first in his class from Northwestern University Medical School. That summer, as he began his two-year residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Time magazine profiled him in a piece on young medical school “wonders,” asking the question: “How young can a doctor be?” Weiss then spent two years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., doing research and writing his book on the deciphering of irregular heart rhythms—this during a time when cardiac monitoring was still a relatively new idea—before returning to Boston as a cardiology research fellow under Dr. Lown at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

Over this time, in part due to Dr. Lown’s example, he had embraced a patient-centric approach to medicine, which he brought with him to his Chicago-area practice. (Years later Weiss would gift Lown a book on the Jews of Lithuania, inscribing “To my rebbe of cardiology.”) On the phone with Krinsky early that morning, Weiss suggested that Krinsky set up the equivalent of a coronary care unit at 770.

“The idea to take care of the Rebbe in this way was sparked by my being able to see how this was applied by my teachers,” explains Weiss. In Boston he had seen special setups made in the homes of people like members of the Kennedy family, and knew that his teacher, Lown, had gone to similar lengths to treat the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild. “Being exposed to Dr. Lown and being exposed to my mentors at the Massachusetts General Hospital, who had the same obligations to take care of special people in the privacy of their own quarters, I told Rabbi Krinsky at the time, that this has been done, and my teachers have taught me this.”

That’s where the conversation ended. A moment later the phone rang again. It was Krinsky. “Dr. Weiss, why don’t you come out here and help us do this?” he asked.

Bringing in Dr. Teichholz

Weiss immediately agreed, but calculated it would take him at least a few hours to get from Chicago to Crown Heights. A competent cardiologist who thought along the same patient-centric lines needed to get to 770 fast. That’s when Weiss remembered that Teichholz, a more senior former colleague at Peter Brigham Hospital in Boston, had just transferred to New York to teach and become head of cardiology at the Mount Sinai Hospital. Weiss hung up with Krinsky and called Mount Sinai immediately.

“As you can imagine, calling a hospital and asking for a certain person to come to the phone doesn’t get you that person right away,” he recalls. The operator “attentively listened to what I was saying, and noting how frantic I was, ran down the hall to the cardiology unit and pulled Dr. Teichholz to the phone. And she put me on with him in that single call.”

Teichholz had only vaguely known of the Rebbe before Weiss’ call, but on hearing the situation cleared his schedule—Teichholz was set to start a tour of lectures on echocardiography—and instead agreed to head to 770 immediately.

“Someone met me at Mount Sinai and I had a police escort going the wrong way down Flatbush Avenue at 90 mph,” Teichholz remembers with a chuckle. Arriving with advanced equipment, Teichholz went straight into the Rebbe’s office and stabilized the situation.

“The fact that I was lucky enough to reach Dr. Teichholz without delay made it possible to intervene effectively, just in the nick of time,” Weiss says, noting that by the time he got there a few hours later the Rebbe’s heart rate was normal and his heart rhythm regular. This was being accurately measured by a telemonitoring device that Teichholz had brought with him, advanced technology that at the time would not have been readily available in most hospitals. “Dr. Teichholz’s prompt interventions were done with a lot of skill and a lot of immediate thinking. Had I not been able to reach Dr. Teichholz, it may not have worked at all.”

Both Weiss and Teichholz, without hesitation, dropped what they were doing because they understood that the Rebbe’s medical care had to be performed in a way that he could continue the vital work of leading the Lubavitch movement and world Jewry, and influencing and teaching humanity at large. Their ability to discern this not only on a personal level but on the medical one drew from lessons they had both been taught by Lown: a physician must take into full consideration each patient’s particular needs, in this case a leader of the Jewish people.

The Rebbe’s heart attack threw Chassidim into a panic. After the conclusion of Simchat Torah, some 48 hours after the initial heart attack, doctors allowed the Rebbe to address the crowd in the synagogue below via a speaker system. (Photo: Levi Freidin/Jewish Educational Media)

“I came down every day from work, met with Dr. Weiss [who spent a month straight at the Rebbe’s side] and Dr. Lown [while he was there], and we took care of the Rebbe,” recalls Teichholz. “Thank G‑d he did well and survived for many years.”

It should be noted that Lown would likewise be an influence on the third cardiologist to join the team, the late Dr. Lawrence M. Resnick. In the aftermath of the Rebbe’s heart attack, Resnick successfully petitioned the U.S. Navy to transfer him from his posting at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii to Brooklyn so he could help treat the Rebbe, and arrived in Crown Heights a few weeks later. Resnick, who would become known as an innovative researcher in hypertension at the Cornell Medical Center in New York, met Lown at 770 and consequently spent two years as a Lown cardiology fellow at Harvard.

From the Bolshoi to 770

On the afternoon after the Rebbe’s heart attack, Rabbi Nochem Kaplan returned to his parents’ home to find his father on the phone. “I’m calling my cousin Baila Hinde [Bella],” his father told him. “We need to bring Bernie to the Rebbe.”

Naturally, Bella Lown was surprised to hear her religious first cousin’s voice on the phone on the holiday. “Vos tustu Moshe?!? [“What are you doing Moshe?!?”], she cried. “Haynt iz yontiff!!” [“It’s the holiday!!”] On hearing what had occurred, she informed Kaplan that her son was in Russia. She told him her brother Chaim (Hyman) Grossbard, a professor at Columbia University in New York, would have Lown’s contact information. Kaplan then called Grossbard and the same scene played itself out, before the former dictated Dr. Lown’s Moscow hotel information.

“All of these calls took hours of work,” remembers the younger Kaplan. Moshe Binyamin Kaplan spent the whole next day of Simchat Torah trying to get patched through to the Moscow hotel, employing the broken Russian of his youth when he finally was. The Moscow hotel in turn told him that the Lowns were at the Bolshoi. When he got through to the Bolshoi, Kaplan began yelling that he was in America, had an emergency and needed to be put through to Dr. Lown immediately. This worked, and Lown was called to the phone mid-act, agreeing to come to New York as soon as he could. Lown and Louise immediately set about rearranging their travel schedule and headed to Brooklyn.

On Sunday, Oct. 9, 1977, the haggard Lowns arrived at JFK airport via Helsinki. Rabbi Nochem Kaplan picked them up at the airport, brought them to his parents’ home, and then drove Lown to 770, where the cardiologist spent the rest of the day. Krinsky recalls Lown spending some time with the doctors and secretariat before heading into the Rebbe’s office.

By the time Lown arrived in Crown Heights the Rebbe was recovering in 770, where Weiss, Teichholz and the team assembled around them had created the equivalent of an advanced coronary care unit in the Rebbe’s office.

“I was actually astounded that he was there to help us,” says Weiss about Lown’s sudden arrival. That Lubavitchers had somehow tracked down Bernard Lown did not very much surprise Weiss, who recalls them somehow procuring whatever he needed no sooner had he said the word (including advanced monitoring equipment from NASA.) Simultaneously, it was such a tumultuous time that he never did end up finding out how Lown, who as far as he knew was in Russia, suddenly walked through the doors of 770 Eastern Parkway.

A Shared Philosophy

Likely unknown to Lown at the time was the fact that the Rebbe had for decades been urging and teaching a remarkably similar model of medicine as Lown’s. This would undoubtedly be a topic of their long, private discussions at 770.

In public talks, correspondences and private audiences dating to the beginning of his leadership in 1950, the Rebbe emphasized the vital importance of preventive care, patient empowerment and the doctor-patient relationship. He regularly advised those turning to him for help to seek second-opinions, worried technology getting in the way of the doctor-patient relationship, and emphasized the immense power of positive language and a healing environments in a medical setting—for example, advising that hospitals in Israel not be called a beit cholim, “house of sickness,” but a beit refuah, a “house of healing.”  The Rebbe likewise counseled that doctors not play G‑d by taking away a patient’s hope. A physician was G‑d’s agent. Technology and medical know-how were tools of their trade, but the power to heal stemmed from G‑d’s blessings and His blessings only.

“‘The emotional support of the doctor, the human being, is most important,’” Israel Prize-winning physician Dr. Mordechai Shani recalled the Rebbe telling him during a 1976 private audience. “‘While technology can be a very helpful tool, it cannot become a replacement for listening and caring.’’” The Rebbe, Shani explained, “expressed the worry that technology might distance the doctor from the patient.”

The physician has an important role in healing, but the patient had to be allowed and encouraged to do their part in the process.

The similarity in the Rebbe and Lown’s philosophy thus made it unsurprising that Lown embraced the Rebbe’s decision to remain in 770. “He said immediately that the Rebbe was absolutely correct,” Krinsky remembers.

Kaplan picked up Lown late that first night in 770. In the few minutes before retiring, an exhausted Lown shared that the Rebbe had been correct to avoid the hospital after his initial heart attack because standard protocol in the hospital would have been to sedate him, and in that state it would have been unlikely the Rebbe would have survived his second heart attack. The Rebbe had insisted that Chassidim celebrate the rest of Simchat Torah with even more joy despite his condition, and Lown noted that he believed the Rebbe’s physical condition was positively affected by being in an enviornment where he was able to hear the sounds of the all-night singing and dancing from the synagogue below.

While the vast majority of doctors had rejected this idea, it took someone like Lown, sure of himself and his vast medical knowledge but cognizant that there was more to healing than science, to give 770’s makeshift hospital his stamp of approval.

Weiss recalls Lown, as the most senior and eminent cardiologist there—a matter not only of his standing but his particular personality—being more at ease conversing with the Rebbe. “When talking to the Rebbe you’re talking to the Rebbe,” Weiss explains. “But Dr. Lown had the authority to have a little bit more of a persuasive dogmatism, and … we were happy he was there.” In general, Weiss says that the Rebbe, as a proponent of second opinions, would consult with Lown as that second opinion, although always sensitive that his other doctors not feel slighted in any way.

“I think he gave the Rebbe and particularly the Rebbetzin a feeling of ‘here’s the senior adult in the room,’” Weiss says. “Dr. Lown didn’t … throw his hands up and say, ‘What are these youngsters thinking of?!’ He was supportive, and he had a few ideas that were uniquely his, which he presented to the Rebbe face to face when they had private meetings, but he didn’t arrive and decide the whole thing needed to be revised radically.”

Kaplan remembers Lown—who spent about a week in Crown Heights on that first visit—telling him about a conversation he had with the Rebbe. The Rebbe had asked him why this heart episode had taken place now. Lown responded that “until now your will power has driven your body. But after a while sheer willpower simply cannot overpower the body, and your heart could not take the load that you are placing on it.”

It was around then that the doctors, Lown included, and with the Rebbetzin’s full support, began discussing the Rebbe rearranging his schedule. At the time the Rebbe held a public farbrengen at least once a month, on Shabbat, and they wanted the Rebbe to cut down on them. “The Rebbe told Dr. Lown that this was not negotiable,” Kaplan says. “He said ‘Shabbos elevates all people. When I speak to them, I elevate them, and they elevate me, and Shabbos elevates us both, so the farbrengens have to continue on Shabbos.’” The Rebbe did not cut down on his public farbrengens—in fact, they increased in number through the 1980s—but for many years wore a telemonitoring device at farbrengens.