Dr. Larry Weinstein with the staff of a hospital in Sangamir, where he performed free surgery through the India Project with its founder, Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet, in 2007. Weinstein has made five trips to India with Dicksheet since 1993, most recently in December.
Photos courtesy Dr. Larry Weinstein
January 15, 2009
Four thousand people were waiting when Dr. Larry Weinstein of Mendham and Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet of Brooklyn arrived at the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital in Aurangabad, India, in mid-December.
Among the crowd were 1,200-1,300 people with major facial deformities — babies and grown-ups with cleft palates, triple nostrils, benign tumors, hypertrophy of the lip (one side much larger than the other), macrostomia (a large mouth relative to the face), and ear deformities.
Each hoped to receive the free corrective operations the two doctors had come to provide through the India Project, founded by Dicksheet in 1968.
“People and children are ridiculed there for significant deformities, and they can’t afford to have them fixed by the plastic surgeons there,” said Weinstein.
Within the first few hours, the pair selected 650 people for the operations they would perform over the next seven days.
“To take care of those significant facial deformities is a real mitzva,” said Weinstein, president of Mount Freedom Jewish Center. “In terms of affecting someone’s life and the numbers of cases you can do in one day, there’s nowhere else I can do this in the world except with Dr. Dicksheet.”
Weinstein runs the Weinstein Plastic Surgery Center with offices in Chester and Summit. He first met Dicksheet, now in his 70s, at Kings County Medical Center, where Weinstein completed his residency and Dicksheet, then a teacher at the Brooklyn hospital, became his mentor.
Weinstein took his first Project India trip in 1993 and has been back four times since, including his most recent trip. The experience has so affected the doctor that his son, Joshua, a filmmaker, made a documentary on Dicksheet and the India Project. Released in 2008, Flying on One Engine made the rounds of local film festivals.
“I ended up on the editor’s floor,” quipped the older Weinstein.
A baby in Aurangabad, India, rests after Weinstein surgically corrected his facial deformities.
When he is not in India, Dicksheet lives in a modest apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. He has won international recognition for his work and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times.
Weinstein offered his own awestruck appraisal of Dicksheet’s work. Paralyzed on his right side from a 1978 car accident, Dicksheet lost his larynx to cancer in 1982, and then had heart attacks in 1988 and 1994.
On this particular trip, he had walking pneumonia, which Weinstein said was being treated with intravenous antibiotics.
“He doesn’t stop,” said Weinstein, who described how in India Dicksheet started surgery at 8 a.m. every day, sitting in his wheelchair, and continuing through the day without stopping. The only difference on this trip was that Dicksheet cut down on his activities after work. “Usually at night we go out to dinner,” said Weinstein. “On this trip we took dinner in his hotel room.”
Although the terror attacks in Mumbai occurred just two weeks before Weinstein and Dicksheet were scheduled to depart on Dec. 12 (Aurangabad is about 300 miles east of Mumbai), they never considered not going. “I never let terrorists rule my life or my plans, ever,” Weinstein said.
But he noticed a difference as soon as they landed.
“It was the first time it had ever been so frenetic in Mumbai, with police and security. The security drills didn’t exist before.” He noticed the hotels and restaurants in Mumbai were empty, as they were in Aurangabad, where tourists often come to view the ancient drawings and carvings in nearby caves.
But the streets were a melee of people,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere in India without seeing lots of people.”
Weinstein acknowledged that the trip isn’t easy. “It takes a lot out of me. I enjoy it, the thrill of helping people no matter what I do, but it’s just a lot. If I go again I’d like to take my own people with me, my own nurse, my own anesthesiologist. I can use theirs, but we do things differently, and it’s safer here.”
Weinstein returned to New Jersey on Dec. 21, just in time for Hanukka. Straight from the airport, he came home to cook latkes to take to the nearby nursing home where one of his parents lives. He was happy when Shabbat came and he could return to Mount Freedom Jewish Center.
“It’s one thing to be in a country of one billion people who believe in 900 different gods. It’s another to be in the shul of my forefathers. Mount Freedom is similar to the shuls my father and grandfather experienced — and the warmth is always positive for my spirit.” He was also relieved to return to the sounds of his ancestors after “listening to Hindi music all day long.”
He said, “It’s good to be back in my own environment, praying amongst my own people.”
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