Marc Lieberman

Marc Frank Lieberman (July 7, 1949 – August 2, 2021) was an American ophthalmologist and humanitarian.^[1]

Biography

He was born Marc Frank Lieberman on July 7, 1949, in Baltimore,^[2] in a Reform Jewish household.^[3] Both his brother and an uncle became rabbis while his father was an ear-nose-and-throat doctor.^[3]

Lieberman attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon where he majored in religion and studied pre-Biblical Canaanite languages.^[3] After college he lived in Israel for a time where he married an Israeli woman, Alicia Friedman,^[2] and had a son.^[3] He took pre-med classes at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[2] Upon returning to the United States, Lieberman attended Johns Hopkins University^[3] and became an ophthalmologist with a focus on glaucoma^[3] with a practice in San Francisco.^[2]

In 1982, Lieberman met Nancy Garfield at a yoga class and she introduced him to the Buddhist community of the Bay Area.^[2] Lieberman and Garfield would eventually marry.^[2]

Lieberman considered himself a Jubu^[4] and was a leader in the lay Buddhist community in the Bay Area.^[2]

When the

Lieberman was also part of the group which invited monastics to found a monastery in California which eventually became Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery.^[6]

In 1995, Lieberman founded the nonprofit Tibet Vision Project to help restore sight to Tibetans with blindness.^[3] Lieberman traveled to Tibet twice a year to run mobile eye camps^[7] and by 2005 had trained 20 Tibetan surgeons and restored sight to more than 2,000 people.^[3] Within 20 years, the Tibet Vision Project had restored sight to over 5,000 people.^[2]

In 2006, a documentary about his work entitled Visioning Tibet was released.^[2]

On August 2, 2021, Lierberman died from prostate cancer.^[6][2]

References