A Healer as Activist – In New York, Russia, and Israel
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Midway through an interview at a sleek conference room at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, Dr. Daniel Igor Branovan’s cell phone began to sing. He politely excused himself and took the call, answering in Russian.
When he hung up, Dr. Branovan, a leading ear, nose, and throat specialist, modestly explained that he and a 10-year-old survivor of the Breslan massacre, whom he had performed reconstructive surgery on, were meeting President Bush together that afternoon. People magazine planned to cover the event, and he had to confirm the photographer’s press clearance with the White House.
In addition to his busy surgery schedule, Mr. Branovan donates his services to victims of terrorism. He is a rising star in New York’s Russian-Jewish community.
When asked how he is able to accomplish so much, the bespectacled Dr. Branovan shook his head and dismissed the compliment with a flick of his hand.
Putting in long hours is one part of the equation. Dr. Branovan, whose Russian-inflected English betrays his arrival in this country at age 13, had started his day at 7 a.m. That qualified as sleeping in – the previous day he rose at 5 a.m., and was kept in emergency surgery until 9 p.m.
Somehow he finds time to have a hand in almost every Russian-Jewish group in New York, from serving as a chair on the American Jewish Committee’s Russian affairs committee to directing the recent purchase of the Russian Forward newspaper by the group he heads, Russian American Jews for Israel.
There has been some controversy in the Russian community regarding the purchase. A Russian newspaper, Poleznaya Gazeta, published a letter recently complaining that the Forward had been “almost the only Russian-language newspaper in America that voiced its disapproval of Putin’s policies,” and is no longer doing so because of the sale. Dr. Branovan has denied any stifling of opposition voices. He told the Sun, “I can tell you unequivocally: Never have I ever been a member of the Putin inner circle.”
Growing up in Kaliningrad, which he called a “little piece of Russia” on the Baltic Sea, his parents kept their connection to Israel secret and the family was nonobservant. An only child, his father was a neurosurgeon and his mother a chemist.
Although nonpracticing, he was frequently beaten up in school for being Jewish. His one close friend, the son of a KGB agent, told the young Dr. Branovan that his grandmother had defected to Israel in the 1970s.
“We had an agreement,” Dr. Branovan recalled. “He promised not to tell anybody my grandmother immigrated to Israel and I promised not to tell anyone his father was in the KGB.”
In 1980, when Dr. Branovan was 13, his parents seized the opportunity to move to America, settling in Philadelphia’s large Russian-Jewish community.
They arrived on a Friday. Monday morning, his parents handed him a token and put him alone on a bus. From that first lonely ride, he climbed through the American school system, starting with a year of English as a second language classes and ending with a medical degree from Stanford University.
Along the way, as an undergraduate at Haverford College in Pennsylvania he met his wife, now a physician in New Jersey, who is also the child of Russian immigrants.
He is now the residency training director and director of the Thyroid Center at the New York Ear and Eye Infirmary. New York magazine, among others, has included him in lists of top physicians.
While he started at his current hospital immediately after medical school, his community activism is more recent. It began about five years ago when he became involved with a project to study Chernobyl victims in the New York area who needed additional medical attention because of their exposure to radiation.
“It’s a large community,” Dr. Branovan said of the Russian-speaking Jews in the New York area, “But there are not a lot of people who do these things. Once you start doing one you get sucked into everything else.”
New York’s Russian community has exceptionally strong ties to Israel, where 1 million Russian Jews live, including much of Dr. Branovan’s family. His support for buying the Russian Forward, which was struggling financially, was a desire to make it “the community newspaper” and a voice advocating for Israel.
“We speak to the choir,” Dr. Branovan said about the affiliation with Israel, “It’s something in the blood. All Russians are fascinated with Israel.”
On a solidarity mission there a few years ago, a family from Haifa whose teenaged child had been injured with shrapnel in his face from a terrorist attack, asked him for help. He brought the victim to New York and successfully operated on him.
As a result of that experience, and as president of the Association of Russian Speaking Medical Professionals, he organized a conference called “Doctors Against Terrorism,” that was attended by about 100 people at Coney Island Hospital.
For Dr. Branovan, support for President Bush is a natural extension of an affiliation with Israel and concern about terrorism. It is an allegiance shared by many in the Russian community. “It’s curious how the American Jews who feel very passionately about Israel still vote Democratic. And it’s curious how the Republicans vote exactly the opposite,” he said, noting Russian speakers voted 76 to 24 for Bush, with the opposite outcome for the non-Russian Jewish community.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Branovan is also president of Russian-American Jews for Bush, a group started for the most recent election. It is yet another of more than a half-dozen groups he helps to run, with the most recent addition his election to the Board of Governors of the American Jewish Committee.
When asked what drives him to continue in his work with the Russian-Jewish community, Dr. Branovan doesn’t hesitate. “It’s an emotional appeal,” he said. “There are a lot of cultural ties between Russian speaking immigrants everywhere. Somebody in Israel, Australia, or Haiti….It’s the feeling of a community. Not just cultural, but emotional ties.”