ROBERT NEWMAN

NEWMAN--Robert ("Bob") G.

MD, MPH, 80, passed away on August 01, 2018. As CEO of Beth Israel Medical Center for 20 years, he championed the creation of palliative care and hospice programs, as well as a very successful Japanese medical-resident exchange program for which he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by his Excellency Sumio Kusaka then Japan Ambassador, Consul-General in New York. He then led the creation of Continuum Health Partners in 1997, from which he retired in 2001. From 2001 until 2013, Robert served as Director of the Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute of Beth Israel Medical Center. For over 40 years, he played a major role in planning and directing some of the largest addiction treatment programs in the world, including the New York City Methadone Maintenance and Ambulatory Detoxification Programs, which in the 1970s served 33,000 patients annually. He was a prolific writer of op-eds and and author of "Methadone Treatment in Narcotic Addiction". Robert is survived by a large, far-flung yet close, international family of which he was the central connecting hub, his children, Hana and Seiji, and granddaughters Miko, Emi, and Noa, whom he loved dearly. He is also survived by the love of his life, his wife Seiko, whom he met while stationed as a U.S. Air Force medical officer in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1967, and brothers Tom (wife Maro), Steve (wife Annie) and their children (Jehan Hanna, Jon ("Hank"), Suzanne, Tony and Vivi Larkin) and grandchildren, and his cousins Charles Opels, Elizabeth ("Dizzy") Howard OBE, John Feld, and Marion Iacopucci. Robert and Seiko celebrated the 52nd anniversary of their first date this past June and would have celebrated 50 years of marriage this year on his birthday, October 26, 1937. Robert was born in The Hague, to which his parents had fled in April 1933 upon Hitler's ascension to power. October 26 was an auspicious day in his life; it was the day he arrived in America, in 1939, from Holland, narrowly escaping the Holocaust that caught his grandparents. His father, Randolph H. Newman, was one of the prosecutors of I.G. Farben on Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor's staff at the Nuremberg trials. He received his MD degree with honors at University of Rochester Medical School and a Master of Public Health at the University of California, Berkley. In lieu of flowers, please consider making donations to two organizations that meant a great deal to him and on whose boards he had the privilege of serving for many years -- the Drug Policy Alliance and the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. He is irreplaceable and will be missed greatly by all members of his loving extended family, the many people he worked with over the decades and those countless others that he cared for and helped.