The Tsarina of a Cosmetics Empire

Dr. Nona Kochina was born to Raya and Grisha Kochina in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg). Her parents were considering an abortion but changed their mind on the last minute.

At the age of four, together with 32 children in her Kindergarten, following a botched vaccination, she contracted infantile paralysis; 30 of the children died but she survived. At the age of 12 she climbed a high tree, a branch on which she was standing broke and she fell from a height of four meters on her back. Her spine was badly injured and she spent a year in a plaster cast. That was when she has decided to become a doctor as well. As she was accepted to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Minsk, she has been diagnosed with a deadly cancer – a lymphatic sarcoma. She went through radiations and a surgery that nearly killed her, and was eventually saved by two Chinese students who were experts in Chines medicine. A year later she started studying medicine. She completed her studies but could not find work as a Jewish doctor at the Soviet Union. She applied to leave the country but was denied, as the daughter of a colonel in the Red Army, who studied medicine at the expense of the state. After another attempt, she received the permit, just as her mom died of cancer and left for Israel with her two kids and grandfather. In Israel she took a job at as a lecturer in anatomy at the Faulty of Medicine at The Aviv University and started, along with Misha Schneersohn, a clinic for alternative medicine, which grew to be the Dr. Nona International, an empire of medicines, cosmetic creams and food additives made from the Dead Sea, with thousands of distributors, all over the world and in the ex-USSR states."