Eli Kassis

Image by: Sawsan Kassis (Eli's wife)

It can easily get emotional when you speak about Israel, but in addition to being Palestinian, Eli is a top heart specialist in Denmark. He is so successful in his field, or “narrow-minded” as he calls it, that a local newspaper in his hometown Nazareth featured a big article on how much he’d achieved. This was long ago, in the 80’s, but Omar Said still remembered it twenty years later when he started to work with Erik Sprunk-Jansen. So Omar said, “contact this doctor when you’re in Copenhagen. He’ll be able to evaluate our products”.

Eli Kassis was smuggled into Israel as a baby. His parents are Palestinian, but when the hospital in Haifa was occupied and his brother was ill, they had to take him to Beirut to be treated. This was in 1948, just when the state of Israel was established, so there was no more Palestine when they wanted to go back. Eli had very high marks in high school. The only university where you could study medicine in Israel accepted one non-Jewish student every second year, but he got in. Then he fell in love with a Danish girl who was studying medicine with him, and they got married and moved to Denmark. “When the embassy found out that I wasn’t a proper Israeli citizen I had to renew my passport every year, and it took half a year to renew it,” he says. Still, he got time to be a doctor. “When I came to Denmark I had a lot of experience already,” he says. “Doctors at war get very good training, and during the war in Israel in 1973, I had my internship in the hospital in Haifa where they treated soldiers with burns. That, in addition to a strong theoretical background meant that I did well as a doctor in Denmark a few years later”, he says. Erik called Eli Kassis and asked him to take a look at Omar’s products. “I was very enthusiastic about them. They included extracts from plants that were known traditionally, and then they’d been tested both in the laboratory and clinically on people,” says Eli. He continues; “herbal remedies compliment traditional medicine, or pharmaceuticals. They’re not meant to be taken instead of, but alongside. In all history of mankind plants existed in order to keep people healthy, and Omar has developed this tradition in a modern scientific way. But although clinical studies can prove that this plant is active and safe, it’s important to remember that plants have been used and tested for thousands of years already.” Other than that, Eli lives with his wife outside Copenhagen, has almost stopped smoking and speaks Danish, except for when he drives his car. (then he speaks Arabic)