Israel nonprofit celebrates 25 years of helping underserved

The Jerusalem Dental Center for Children -- also known as the Luba Slome Dental Center -- will celebrate 25 years of providing preventive and restorative care to the underserved in Israel at a dinner honoring Bruce Donoff, D.M.D., M.D., dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and his wife, Madelyn, former chair of the Boston Chapter of Hadassah.

The event, which will also pay tribute to the first two directors of the clinic -- Mark Wagner, D.M.D., and Warren Morganstein, D.D.S., M.P.H. -- will be held June 13, 2010, in Brookline, MA.

Isaac Perle, D.M.D., founder and president of Luba Slome Dental Center in Jerusalem.

The Luba Slome Dental Center was founded in Jerusalem in 1985 by Isaac Perle, D.M.D., a Boston dentist and former faculty member at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Disturbed by the lack of quality dental services available to Jerusalem's poor and the widespread ignorance regarding proper dental habits, he lobbied then-mayor Teddy Kollek about establishing a nonprofit dental clinic to serve this population.

"In 1981, I was on a vacation in Israel and couldn't help but notice the poor state of dental health of the kids in many neighborhoods we visited," he told DrBicuspid.com.

In 1984, Dr. Perle managed to convince the mayor and the local public health department to provide a building, which they did for 21 years rent-free, he said. The next step was to figure out staffing, and it was decided that the clinic would offer a general residency program to dental students in the U.S. and Canada.

"We were also looking for a director, someone who wanted to take a sabbatical to run the program in Israel," Dr. Perle said. "Then I got a call from Dr. Wagner at the University of Maryland, who said he had some students who were interested and also that he had a sabbatical coming up and he was interested in running the clinic."

Dr. Wagner's sabbatical only lasted six months, however, so they recruited Dr. Morganstein, also of the University of Maryland, to take over for the other six months. The residents were paid $12,000 that first year, and the directors $5,000 apiece.

The clinic -- which was named for Luba Slome, the first Jewish woman to graduate as a dentist from the University of Warsaw in Poland -- opened in July 1985 with an annual budget of $80,000. That first year, the clinic had two full-time residents and the faculty, each seeing about five to six patients a day, Dr. Perle said.

"Now we have 45 people on staff, including 13 dentists, seeing 1,500 patients a month," he said. "We are the largest nonprofit clinic in Jerusalem focused on pediatric dentistry. Since we started, we have treated over 400,000 patients."

Six days a week

With an annual budget of $1.2 million, which includes donation and grant money, the center today boasts five chairs that "run constantly" from morning to night six days a week, according to Dr. Perle.

"Since dental insurance is not standard in Israel, the middle class gets pushed out and cannot afford dental care," he said. "My clinic takes everyone, so that middle-income patients can afford care as well."

Pediatric patients pay about 70% of what it normally costs elsewhere in Jerusalem, and adults pay about 30%, Dr. Perle said. "The fees in Jerusalem are not quite what they are in the U.S., but this is not a Third World country. It is a modern city."

Among the services offered at Luba Slome:

• Preventative care, including cleanings, checkups, and education
• Fluoride treatments
• Routine restorative care
• Orthodontic
• Special programs designed to minimize anxiety, pain, and trauma for children who require extensive treatment

The center offers educational workshops both at the clinic and in schools all around the city. Luba Slome's Family Dental Caries Prevention Programs have taught thousands of families how to improve dental hygiene and prevent costly and painful diseases, Dr. Perle noted.

"Our goal was not to be a restorative facility but to teach prevention," he said. "We go into classrooms and teach oral hygiene. We have activities we plan and published materials to give them that have an activity related to dentistry once a week. So far we've reached over 4,000 children, and now we are trying to reach out to 18,000 kindergarten children that no one, so far, is working with."

Dr. Perle has also met with the minister of health to talk about the government providing funding for dental care and dental education for children, he added.

He does all of this, he said, in addition to running a private practice in Brookline and volunteering his time to other organizations and projects.

"Both of my parents are Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in the 1950s with nothing," he said. "When you grow up in a family with this type of history, it stresses the meaning of value in your life. I feel a deep sense of obligation to help people who otherwise wouldn't be helped, and a very strong motivation to give back."

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