Helping Patients Heal
One of the seniors who caught the attention of the Life editors was Judith Gorenstein (now Ronat), president of the math club. "There was nothing very special about me, except I stood out like a sore thumb [as a woman]," says Ronat, a psychiatrist in Israel. Ronat was one of 12 women to receive one of the 759 bachelor's degrees awarded on the morning of June 8, 1956. She vividly remembers graduation day because it was also her wedding day: having promised her mother that she'd get her diploma before tying the knot, she married Elhanan "Ed" Ronat '56 at the MIT chapel that afternoon.

Ronat had wanted to be a mathematician since she was four but had changed her mind by 19. "I discovered I really didn't have the qualities to become a great one, and I wasn't going to settle for anything less," she says. During her freshman year, one of the brightest women in her class had flunked out. So Ronat decided to become a psychiatrist for college students, to help them achieve their potential. She applied to Tufts Medical School and is convinced her photo in Life helped her get in. "I was very naïve, and when I was interviewing for medical school, I said I was engaged to be married. And that was a big no-no," she says. A married woman, after all, would never finish med school. The admissions officers must have reasoned, "Well, she must be something if Life magazine wants her," Ronat says with a chuckle. "Maybe we'll take her too."

While Ronat attended Tufts Medical School, her husband got his physics doctorate at Harvard. They started a family during her residency at McLean Hospital. "My internship was 128 hours a week, and residency was down to 60, so I thought there'd be plenty of time to have a baby," she says. They had another child to "celebrate finishing my residency," and a third after they moved to Israel. Ed was a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth until his death in 1989, and Judith practiced psychiatry at Kupat Holim Clalit, the largest HMO in Israel, for 34 years. She also served as medical director of the mental-health clinic in Rishon L'Zion and taught at the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine.

Ronat officially retired at 65, but she enjoys her work so much that she maintains a small private practice and consults for Israel's Ministry of Defense, counseling orphans, widows, and parents of soldiers and police, as well as veterans with disabilities. The most difficult cases are those of Holocaust survivors who have lost children in the army. "It's a double whammy," Ronat says. Over the years, her approach has evolved significantly from the Freudian analytical approach she was taught. "Remember the old saying ‘God helps those who help themselves?' Well, I consider myself one of his lowly assistants," says Ronat. "Very often, just by reframing a problem which a patient grapples with, I can enable him to discover his own solution to the problem."

[click here for images of 1956 Class members]