Dr. John Bengtson, a 19-time DVI volunteer was honored during DVI’s 35th Anniversary Gala for his dedication to the clinic and Jerusalem’s kids. Imagine all the healthy smiles he helped create!
His were not your average remarks. To honor DVI’s founder Trudi Birger and the clinic, he took his cue from an American president. We’re sure you will enjoy his special words.
The NYC Address
One score and fifteen years ago our Trudi Birger brought forth in the State of Israel a new creation, conceived in compassion and dedicated to the proposition that all children deserve the right to better dental health, regardless of their ability to pay. Now we are engaged in a ceremony of remembrance testing to see whether this organization or any organization engaged in volunteerism, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met here in the great city of New York to rededicate our resolve to preserve a little dental clinic in the greater city of Jerusalem, the city of our G_d. For those precious children whom we serve to give a lifetime of dental health. For it is so altogether proper that we do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this occasion without remembering the brave little lady, who though now dead, will long be remembered as one who bore the injustices of a concentration camp and survived, filled not with bitterness nor hatred but with a passion to give aid to those children and families whom, through no fault of their own, needed assistance. It is for us the living to finish the dream of the little lady we esteem. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but the children of Jerusalem will not forget what DVI does for them. So that, we here highly resolve that her work shall not die in vain. But this organization of DVI, under G_d, shall have a new birth of resolve that no child of Jerusalem should suffer the consequences of no dental care. And that DVI will always be of the dentists, by the dentists and for the children of Jerusalem.
Any resemblance to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is purely intentional.
Thank you,
John Bengtson, DDS
YOUR GIFT HELPS US CREATE HEALTHY SMILES!