102-year-old finally allowed to defend doctoral thesis she was denied by Nazis-77 years later

[Panich52]

Daily Kos

102-year-old finally allowed to defend doctoral thesis she was denied by Nazis-77 years later

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.
. ...

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.

More
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/14/1384726/-102-year-old-finally-allowed-to-defend-doctoral-thesis-she-was-denied-by-Nazis-77-years-later?detail=email

[hunter]

1. Excuse me, that's DOCTOR Rapoport...

... and her title ought to be retroactive 77 years.

[Dont call me Shirley]

2. Congratulations Doctor Ingeborg Rappaport!

[Rolando]

3. Red Scare

Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and many others persecuted Jews (including Einstein and his circle), suspecting many of them of being Communists. The FBI had a thick file on Einstein. Trying to drive him out of the country, however, would have been a political disaster for the American ruling party at the time.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. cool story