A Haifa childhood
Miriam Farbstein was born on 10 October 1945 in Tel Aviv, then part of British Mandatory Palestine, three years before the founding of the State of Israel. Her parents had both left their families in Poland in the 1930s and emigrated to the Land of Israel, escaping the destruction that would soon engulf Polish Jewry. Her mother had been raised in a Hasidic community and chose to go to Zion against her rabbi’s urging; her father was active in Labor Zionist circles, a member of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement and later of the left-wing Mapam party.
In the 1950s the family settled in Haifa, where her father owned and ran several cinemas and her mother managed one of the concessions. Miriam, a middle child who later described herself as “the sandwich, the middle, the most ambitious”, spent twelve years at the Hebrew Reali School, one of Israel’s most demanding secular schools, and was a member of Tzofim, the Israeli scouting movement. She has said that she grew up knowing that her country’s existence depended on a strong army, a conviction that shaped her for life.
Science, the army and medical school
She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and genetics. Like other young Israelis she then did military service, spending two years in the Israel Defense Forces in biological research, based at Ness Ziona.
She went on to medical school at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and graduated magna cum laude. Her first marriage, to the physician Ariel Ochshorn, produced two daughters, Sivan and Yasmin; the couple were divorced by the mid-1980s. As a young doctor she practised internal and emergency medicine and rose to become head physician of internal medicine and emergency medicine at Rokach (Hadassah) Hospital in Tel Aviv.
Finding her life’s work
It was in the emergency room that she met the patients who would define her career. She has recalled treating a young woman, near death from a heroin overdose, and being struck by how little help people like her received. Drug users, she later said, were a part of society that did not cry out for itself, and few doctors chose to specialise in their care.
In 1986 she went to Rockefeller University in New York on an exchange programme, working until 1989 as an associate physician. There she found her mentor in Mary Jeanne Kreek, the physician-scientist who, with colleagues in the 1960s, had developed methadone maintenance therapy for heroin addiction and who had shown that methadone is safe and most effective when taken under a doctor’s care. Adelson became a guest investigator in Kreek’s Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases and collaborated with her for more than two decades, publishing numerous scientific papers on addiction. Among the questions she has pursued is whether there is a genetic component to addiction, not only to drugs but to behaviours such as gambling and internet use.
Clinics that treat addiction as a disease
In 1993 she opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Clinic for Drug Abuse Treatment and Research in Tel Aviv, at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Its methadone programme was the first in Israel to be affiliated with a hospital, and it helped to spread a message that was still controversial at the time: that addiction is a chronic disease to be treated by doctors, not simply a moral failing to be punished. From the start, she told an interviewer, “the clinic was doing treatment and research.”
In 2000 she opened a second clinic in Las Vegas, treating teenagers and adults addicted to heroin and prescription painkillers. Methadone, a long-acting synthetic opioid, prevents the agony of withdrawal, which one of her patients described to her as “a million times the pain of the flu”, without producing a high, so that patients can hold down jobs and care for their families. Both clinics combine methadone pharmacotherapy with counselling and social support, and between them they have treated thousands of people addicted to heroin and cocaine. She was one of the few addiction specialists in the United States licensed to give methadone to minors, and she continued to put on a white coat and see patients herself long after she had become one of the world’s wealthiest women. Through her Las Vegas work she also advised social-service agencies in Macao as they developed their own treatment clinics.
The clinics opened years before the opioid epidemic swept through the United States, and their model, medically supervised treatment that keeps patients alive and stable while they rebuild their lives, is now the mainstream standard of care. “In this field,” she has said, “with every person you save, you save another 20 people around them.”
A partnership and a personal loss
In 1989 she was introduced on a blind date to Sheldon Adelson, the Boston-born entrepreneur who had created the COMDEX computer trade show and was then building a casino business in Las Vegas. They married in 1991 and had two sons, Adam and Matan. On their honeymoon in Venice he conceived the idea for the Venetian resort, which would grow into Las Vegas Sands, one of the largest casino companies in the world.
The clinics were a joint project of the marriage, and addiction touched the family directly: Sheldon Adelson’s adopted son Mitchell, from his first marriage, died of a drug overdose in 2005. The couple were married for nearly thirty years, until Sheldon Adelson’s death in January 2021.
Giving to medicine and education
In 2006 the couple created the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, which funds collaborative research on diseases including ovarian cancer and melanoma, and on neurorehabilitation and the repair of damaged nerves. Its model brings teams of scientists from different institutions together to share results rather than compete. By 2018 it had distributed some $67 million. She has served on the board of trustees of Rockefeller University, to which she was elected in 2016, and is a trustee of the University of Southern California. Tel Aviv University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2007.
Education has been her other great cause. In November 2006 the Adelsons made a major gift to a Jewish day school in Summerlin, Las Vegas, later followed by some $50 million for construction; renamed the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Educational Campus, it grew from about 145 pupils to around 600, and runs from preschool to high school. She helped to shape it partly on the model of her own Reali School. The couple also gave gifts to Hebrew SeniorLife for programmes bringing older people and schoolchildren together, to Gateways: Access to Jewish Education for children with special needs, and to the Chelsea Jewish Foundation for specialised housing for people with ALS and multiple sclerosis.
Israel and the Jewish people
Adelson describes herself as an ardent Zionist and has said that her heart remains in Israel. Through the Adelson Family Foundation, established in 2007, she and her husband became the largest donors to Birthright Israel, which brings young Jewish adults on free trips to Israel; by 2015 their gifts had passed $250 million. They have also been major supporters of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and research centre, and of the Israeli American Council, and she sits on the board of the American branch of Tzofim, working to bring scouting to Israeli-American and American Jewish children. She has spoken of being moved to tears whenever children at the Las Vegas school sing Hatikvah.
Since 2018 she has been publisher of Israel Hayom, the free daily newspaper founded by her husband in 2007, which became one of the most widely read papers in Israel. Some of her family’s Israel-related giving, including a gift to the medical school of Ariel University in the West Bank, which opened in 2019, has been politically contested.
Business and politics
After her husband’s death she became the controlling shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, which she oversees with her family, and she ranks among the wealthiest people in the world; Forbes has listed her among the ten richest women in America. In December 2023 she and her son-in-law Patrick Dumont bought a controlling stake in the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.
She is also one of the largest individual political donors in the United States, giving mainly to Republican candidates and causes, including the campaigns of Donald Trump, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. Her political giving and positions on Israel draw both praise and criticism; this profile focuses on her work in medicine, research and education.
A doctor first
Miriam Adelson has lived a life of unusual range: Israeli scout, army researcher, emergency-room physician, laboratory scientist, philanthropist, newspaper publisher and business owner. But the thread that runs through it is medicine, and in particular a group of patients whom most of the profession preferred to avoid.
Long before addiction became a national emergency in the United States, she insisted that people addicted to heroin deserved the same evidence-based care as anyone else with a chronic illness, and she built clinics in two countries to provide it. Thousands of patients have passed through their doors. Her foundations continue to fund medical research and Jewish education, and the school in Las Vegas that bears her name teaches hundreds of children each year. For her, the measure of the work has always been simple: patients who arrived dejected and weakened, and left with their lives back.
Sources & further reading
Miriam Adelson, Wikipedia · Miriam O. Adelson, a physician and expert in drug addiction research, is elected to the Board, Rockefeller University · American View: Miriam Adelson, Hadassah Magazine · 5 things to know about Miriam Adelson, JTA via The Times of Israel · Adelson Foundations, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.