Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, three decades before Israel itself existed as a state. That fact alone stops you in your tracks. A university was born before its country, planted on a contested hillside in Jerusalem as an act of faith in a future that had not yet arrived. How does an institution take root when the ground beneath it is still being negotiated? And what happens to a library, a hospital, a campus, when a war breaks out and your own city is carved in two?

  Those are some of the questions this documentary explores. But the story of HUJI reaches further than survival. It touches on a fierce argument over which language scholars should use in lecture halls, on a bomb that detonated in a crowded cafeteria during lunch hour, on a bequest from Albert Einstein that left his most private papers to the university's library. Fifteen Nobel Prize winners, two Fields Medalists, and three Turing Award winners have been affiliated with the institution. Four Israeli prime ministers studied there. Yet the university also sits on land whose ownership remains disputed, and its campus on Mount Scopus was once completely cut off from the rest of Jerusalem for nearly two decades. The story of how HUJI got from its cornerstone to its current standing as the top-ranked university in Israel is one worth hearing carefully.

• 2. A Language and an Identity

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  Before the first lecture was ever given at the Hebrew University, its founders were locked in a heated argument about what language the lectures should be in. One faction, known as the "Germanists," proposed using a combination of German and Arabic for subjects outside Jewish studies. Their concern was practical: Modern Hebrew was still young, and its vocabulary lacked the technical terms needed for serious academic discourse in fields like science, medicine, and law.

  The other side rejected this position, not primarily on linguistic grounds, but on symbolic ones. Hebrew carried a weight that went beyond grammar. For Jewish communities around the world, it represented continuity and collective identity in a way that no combination of German and Arabic could. The Germanists were not wrong on the narrow technical question, but they misjudged how much the idea of a Hebrew-language institution meant to people outside the university walls.

  In 1919, Shmaryahu Levin reached out to a number of prominent Jewish European scholars to gather opinions on what the university's Hebrew character should actually mean in practice. One of those consulted was Ignaz Goldziher, and his proposals shaped the early curriculum in a concrete way: oriental languages, Jewish literature, and archaeology became among the first subjects offered. The language debate, though, went beyond syllabi. It touched on questions of organizational structure, the definition of research areas, and the overall academic identity the institution would project. The Hebrew side prevailed, and the university's identity as an explicitly Hebrew institution was set before a single classroom was opened.

• 3. The Gala and the War

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  On the 1st of April 1925, the campus on Mount Scopus was officially opened at a gala ceremony. The guest list was extraordinary. The Earl of Balfour attended, as did Viscount Allenby, Winston Churchill, and Sir Herbert Samuel. Scholars, public figures, and Jewish community leaders from around the world gathered on the hill to mark the moment. Judah Magnes, the university's first chancellor, presided over an institution that had already been in conceptual development for decades, with proposals dating back to an 1884 conference of the Hovevei Zion society in Kattowitz.

  Among the founding board of governors were Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber, names that suggest the intellectual ambition the founders had in mind from the outset. By 1947, the university had grown into a significant research and teaching institution, and it seemed poised to continue expanding.

  Then the 1948 Arab-Israeli War arrived, and it tore that trajectory apart. Arab forces under Abdul Kader Husseini threatened military action against Hadassah Hospital on the Mount Scopus campus, accusing the Jewish side of using the facilities as bases for attacks. In April 1948, a convoy bound for the hospital was ambushed. Seventy-nine people were killed, including doctors and nurses. British soldier Jack Churchill coordinated the evacuation of 700 Jewish doctors, students, and patients from the site. The Mount Scopus campus, the same hillside where Churchill and Balfour had stood just twenty-three years earlier, was now cut off from the rest of Jerusalem.

• 4. A Campus in Pieces

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  With Mount Scopus inaccessible under Jordanian control, the Hebrew University had to improvise on a scale that would have seemed absurd to anyone who had attended the 1925 gala. Classes were spread across 40 different buildings scattered throughout the city of Jerusalem. One of those locations was the Terra Santa building in the Rehavia neighborhood, rented from the Franciscan Custodians of the Latin Holy Places.

  A new central campus was constructed at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem and completed in 1958. It was an enormous undertaking, building an entire university campus from scratch while simultaneously trying to maintain academic continuity across dozens of borrowed spaces. The Hadassah Medical Organization partnered with the university during this period to build a medical science campus in the Ein Kerem neighborhood, in the south-west of the city.

  By the beginning of 1967, the university had 12,500 students distributed between its two Jerusalem campuses and the agricultural faculty in Rehovot. After the Six-Day War of June 1967 reunified Jerusalem under Israeli control, Mount Scopus was rebuilt. Construction work on the restored campus was completed in 1981, and Mount Scopus again became the main campus. The years of displacement had lasted close to two decades. According to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, Israel confiscated 568 dunams of land from the Palestinian village of Isawiya for the Hebrew University in 1968, a fact that remains part of the contested history of the campus's reconstruction.

• 5. Einstein's Papers

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  Albert Einstein did not just co-found the Hebrew University. He left it something irreplaceable. In his will, Einstein bequeathed the university his personal papers and the copyright to them. What arrived in the library's collection amounted to some 55,000 items, now held in the Albert Einstein Archives.

  Those items include personal notes and love letters to various women, among them the woman who would become his second wife, Elsa. In March 2012, the university announced that it had digitized the entire archive and was planning to make it more accessible online. The archive sits within the Jewish National and University Library, which was originally founded in 1892 as a world center for the preservation of books relating to Jewish thought and culture. It became a general university library in 1920. Its collections of Hebraica and Judaica are described as the largest in the world, and its holdings exceed five million books, supplemented by thousands of items in special collections.

  Among those special collections are Hebrew manuscripts, the Gershom Scholem collection, the Eran Laor map collection, the Edelstein science collection, and a collection of Maimonides' manuscripts and early writings. Until 2023, the National Library of Israel held the distinction of being the world's largest library for Jewish studies, and it was located on the university's Edmond J. Safra campus in the Givat Ram neighborhood. The library has since moved, but its decades of presence on campus shaped the intellectual texture of the institution in ways that outlast the physical address.

• 6. Bomb at the Cafeteria

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  On the 31st of July 2002, a member of a terrorist cell detonated a bomb at the Frank Sinatra International Student Center on campus. The explosion happened during lunch hour, when the cafeteria was crowded with staff and students. Nine people were killed: five Israelis, three Americans, and one person holding dual French-American citizenship. More than 70 others were wounded.

  Condemnation came quickly from world leaders. Kofi Annan, President George W. Bush, and the EU's High Representative Javier Solana all issued statements. The attack struck at a place where students from different countries mixed, which made its symbolism particularly stark. The Frank Sinatra International Student Center was, by its name and function, a point of international connection within the university.

  The bombing did not close the university or interrupt its academic operations for long. The institution continued under a succession of presidents who navigated both the security environment and the normal demands of running a major research university. Menachem Ben-Sasson served as president from 2009 to 2017, when Asher Cohen succeeded him. In 2017, the same year Cohen took office, the university launched a marijuana research center focused on cannabis and its biological effects, with an eye toward commercial applications. The proximity of those two facts in time is incidental, but it captures something about how a university continues to operate across a very wide range of concerns simultaneously.

• 7. Spinoffs and Rankings

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  Yissum Research Development Company, the Hebrew University's technology transfer arm, was founded in 1964. Its purpose is to handle licenses and patents generated by the university's researchers and employees. Since its formation, Yissum has spun off more than 80 companies. Among those spinoffs are Mobileye, BriefCam, HumanEyes, OrCam, and ExLibris.

  The university's global academic standing reflects that research output. According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities, HUJI is the top university in Israel. Its mathematics department has been particularly distinguished in these rankings, placing 11th in the world in 2017, 19th in 2018, 21st in 2019, and 25th in 2020. In the 2021 Shanghai Ranking, the university placed 90th worldwide, while the Center for World University Rankings placed it 64th that same year.

  The international network supporting the university reflects how the institution's reach extends far beyond its campuses. The Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded in 1944 by the Canadian philanthropist Allan Bronfman. The American Friends of the Hebrew University was founded in 1925 by Felix M. Warburg. These organizations have sustained scholarship and research partnerships across more than 25 countries. Back in Jerusalem, the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, named for a leader of the Jewish Distribution Committee and founded in 1958, claims the distinction of having established the first Bachelor of Social Work degree in Israel, with the Master of Social Work introduced in 1970, and it has been ranked the highest-rated school of social work in the country.