Gershom

I'm a 52-year-old, married male with an Honors in English from Carleton University in Ottawa (1972). My further education was interrupted by a near-fatal car accident, as a result of which I'm partially paraplegic. In 1973 I went to work as a reporter/photographer with a community newspaper in southern Ontario, becoming general manager by 1976, and teaching creative writing at Ryerson's King Campus. I then took a three-year break, during which I managed to teach myself science by reading doctoral theses in a university library and writing to the authors to confirm that I had understood their work correctly.

I then joined Maclean Hunter publications in Toronto, working as an editor for The Medical Post, and as editor in chief (setting and meeting a $250,000 editorial budget) for Canadian Research, Canadian Biotechnology, Hospital Product News, and Canadian Clinical Laboratory. While in these posts, the "generalist" education I had acquired helped me identify and promote what was genuinely new, and to bring together researchers in various fields.

Since moving to Israel in 1989, I have been employed full-time by The Jerusalem Post, where I serve as Managing Editor of the International Edition and as one of the paper's four Internet editors. Also during this time, I have held a number of freelance posts, editing four early volumes of the Steinsaltz Talmud, about a dozen religious and scientific books, a monthly high-tech report, and have done the copy editing/layout for over 50 issues of a weekly four-color magazine published by Chabad. Six years ago, I took a three-month leave of absence from the Post to commission, assemble and edit 500,000 custom-written words for a Holocaust Museum on CD-ROM (the Holocaust being a life-long interest).

I've also written a large body of poetry, prose and song lyrics, play the synthesizer, paint, and do a little inventing and theoretical physics on the side. Over the past two years I have conceived of a new way to get total paraplegics back on their feet, and am now working with Dr. Yehuda Sonnenblick of the Jerusalem College of Technology to investigate the viability of the concept and the possibility of securing a research grant to design and test a prototype.

I can be reached at the Post ((02) 531-5452, e-mail gershom@jpost.co.il) or at home ((02) 679-3782, e-mail gershon1@netvision.net.il).