JNS
The University of Haifa, Tel Aviv's Afeka College of Engineering and the Jerusalem College of Technology are pushing ahead with ambitious plans to develop their campuses.
While Israel’s Swords of Iron War has absorbed the nation’s attention for the last eighteen months, several institutions of higher learning are focusing their attention on moving forward by finding innovative ways to train the next generations of students.
Each of these educational bodies serves diverse populations and regions although there is a strong thread of their leadership recognizing significant gaps—and genuine need—and turning their attention to fill them.
While the University of Haifa has cemented itself as a dynamic institution across multiple academic fields, at the beginning of the next academic year in the fall of 2025 it will accept the first cohort at its new Herta and Paul Amir School of Medicine.
Prof. Haim Bitterman will lead the school. When asked why he agreed to do so, he replied coyly, “Because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse!” He quickly added: “I’m sure I can lead the team that can bring a partial solution. I thought it seemed a most important and rewarding exercise.”
Bitterman has experience running hospitals and in 2015 he was appointed director-general of Assuta Ashdod Medical Center. “My grandchildren tell me that I’m a builder,” he told JNS. “Life brought me opportunities to build stuff and it’s great fun to know you can gather forces to build something new.”
The six-year program will start with some 64 students in the initial intake, with teaching conducted in groups of eight students. Both Bitterman and Gideon Herscher, vice president for Transformational Philanthropy and Global Resource Development, acknowledged that the school would likely need to grow later, and also require the addition of another school, slated for completion by the end of the decade.
There were a large number of applications—in fact, it was massively oversubscribed, highlighting the potential that resides in Haifa and its environs. “We’re about two decades too late,” lamented Herscher, “but I think it’s serendipitous the opportunity surfaced, as we’ve been pursuing this for more than a decade. The north is more ready than ever to receive medical care.”
It would be trite to suggest the timing of the medical school’s opening is propitious because it’s clear that a great deal of thought and preparation have gone into identifying trends—both in terms of medical practitioners—and the nature and age of the patients they treat.
Bitterman made an interesting observation, namely that the young doctors and medical professionals who emigrated from the Former Soviet Union in the great wave of aliyah in the late 1980s and 1990s are now rapidly approaching retirement age.
This, among other issues—such as the Ministry of Health's not recognizing (correctly, in Bitterman’s opinion) accreditation from a number of medical schools abroad—means there is a dire shortage of qualified doctors in Israel. The situation, according to Bitterman, is particularly acute in the country’s north.
While the first cohort of medical students is in the process of finalization, both Bitterman and Herscher were aware and sensitive to how prospective medical practitioners of the future could be attracted to the University of Haifa Medical School.
“The state of the art building—designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdi—will be a wonderfully pleasant place to learn,” Bitterman enthused. “Also, scholarships are a tangible incentive, and we are actively fundraising for the students’ entire six-year program to be underwritten.”
Herscher said it would cost about $1.5 million to provide full scholarships for the school’s first 64 students to complete six years of study. To put this into context, he said, a similar arrangement at a mid-level U.S. medical school with intra-state students would cost approximately 100 times that amount.
“Fortunately, tuition is cheap in this country,” Herscher quipped. “And the Haifa area is relatively inexpensive as far as lodging is concerned.”
The demands of Swords of Iron have succeeded in ramming home a number of lessons for what this means, particularly for those in the north, where tens of thousands of people have yet to return to their homes.
“This is part of our commitment to not only help with reintegration of tens of thousands of residents to the north but keep them there,” Herscher said. “The evacuation has brought a heavy price to the north and there are those who are not rushing back. We have developed a quiet and tender strategy to give them what they need to remain in the area.”
While he admitted it would take a number of years, there was a pressing need to begin the process of trying to heal as quickly as possible. “Something has to start,” he stated matter-of-factly.
To that end, Herscher said there were more than 30 initiatives being implemented to help people in the north deal with the trauma of the last year-and-a-half.
“I’ve discovered some hidden gems at the University of Haifa; it is not only a research university, we’re also bringing the ivory tower to the communities," he said. "Wisdom that emanates from laboratories is being utilized to help those who are coming home and also those who need extra assistance to return home—where a family can be stabilized and healed."
Herscher concluded: "If we have expertise in trauma care or nurses to detect the early signs of depression or help elderly people grapple more effectively with loneliness, the Medical School can be a flagship example of the impact we can have not only in Haifa but across the north.”
Bringing STEM to south Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv’s Afeka Academic College of Engineering, through its president Prof. Ami Moyal, is also focused on identifying areas that are lacking and seeking a structured, methodical and planned way to fill them with highly motivated and skilled engineers. Moyal has led the college since 2014 but it is in the last seven or so years that he identified a shift in the job market and began to tailor its curriculum to meet a new kind of demand.
“The model has changed from some 200 years ago—which was prevalent in K-12, as well as lifelong learning—and it moved away from being knowledge-based to competency-based,” he told JNS. “Educational processes brought knowledge, however the advent of Artificial Intelligence has shifted the emphasis to skills."
"We implemented a major change by defining the ideal graduate profile and skills—changing the pedagogy to integrate them into the course," he added. “We also realized students needed to be given time to work together to produce a specific outcome, emphasizing the need for collaboration.”
One of the starkest developments as a result of the shift of learning emphasis and changing the entire educational process, was that the physical layers of the campus also needed to adapt to keep pace. “We understood we must introduce a change; the new generation of students cannot sit for eight hours in a classroom,” Moyal said.
He conceded that they didn’t get everything right and there were things the college’s leadership didn’t quite understand at the time. “Either you sit and wait for someone to develop a theory or you move forward," he said. “We developed a methodology and we started. It was trial and error, but what we’re doing represents an ongoing multi-year institutional change.”
As a result of this change, and the fact the student body has grown some 50% in the last few years, the college is moving to purpose-built premises in the south of Tel Aviv—migrating to the south-east of the city from its current north Tel Aviv home. This too was a deliberate and considered choice, and was taken in close cooperation with Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai.
“It is an area [of the city] from which fewer teenagers go to college; we hope and expect that shifting the academic institution to a lower socio-economic area will assist in developing the whole urban surroundings,” Moyal said.
He argued that it would be “good” if there was a highly-regarded engineering school in the south part of Tel Aviv.
“The young population will see students like them on a daily basis, learning engineering—and becoming active role models. It will build motivation. In addition, we want to develop the ecosystem with all local high schools in Tel Aviv, and crucially, we’ll have enough space to host high-school pupils and see how they get on in our labs.
Moyal emphasized this was a three-tiered attempt at developing the local, national, and social needs. “Initially, we want the area to flourish. On a national level we simply need to increase the number of engineers, and socially, we want to give access to higher education to as many people as possible, especially for those who might have expected it was out of reach.”
The move to the new campus, which is expected to be completed by the opening of the 2027 academic year, will also be a vehicle for creating additional engineering programs. Moyal hopes the college will attract students from across the periphery—as well as all sectors of Israeli society."
Moyal is also sensitive to the ratio of men-to-women studying different disciplines of engineering.
“With regard to the STEM subjects,” Moyal explained, referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, “we’ve reached a relatively okay point where women make up some 30% of the student population. However, with regard to electrical and mechanical engineering it’s only hovering around 15%. We want to give prospective students the opportunity to see the labs, and from there build motivation and confidence; if they want it, they can do it. But they need to want it. The courses are not easy.”
Speaking of women—especially ultra-Orthodox women—the Jerusalem College of Technology is “the only game in town” with regard to their specific social and educational needs, according to Stuart Hershkowitz, chairman of JCT's Executive Committee.
JCT is in the process of building its new Tal Campus for Women, after some 15 years of bureaucracy and red tape held up the development. “It was clear some 20 years ago we’d have to move,” Hershkowitz said.
“The [Jerusalem] Municipality wanted to put us in Pisgat Ze’ev, then thought about Gilo, and then near to the Ramada Hotel close to the entrance to the city. It was about 2010 on Yom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Day]—when the national government gives a gift every year to the city of Jerusalem—we got our campus. The land is in the valley underneath where the men’s college is today. We believe in sex separation; we felt having two campuses side-by-side is something we and our students could live with.”
The college’s emphasis on providing knowledge and skills to a largely haredi student body only grows in significance as the potential for an increasingly fractious national debate over the role of the ultra-Orthodox in the life of the country develops.
Hershkowitz pointed out that at the men’s campus, Haredi students learn alongside national-religious men wearing army uniforms. They sit together in class and there hasn’t been any friction or tension because of that.
"Many of our national religious students have been in military service for the last 18 months, but people come here to study to get their degree," He said. "It’s not like U.S. college life. We don’t teach liberal arts, and our students work hard to develop the skills to work in a profession. It’s very much part of the college’s outlook.”
For ultra-Orthodox women, being able to study and more importantly still, subsequently work in professions, which suit their lifestyle, is one of JCT’s key selling points. “Accounting firms were the first ones who understood the potential of the female Haredi community,” Hershkowitz explained, “all of our courses are geared to women who know they can go out into the world, and do things which are haredi-friendly.”
Computer science is another subject considered haredi-friendly, with a lot of hi-tech places accommodating them – with some working from home, while others work from offices where they are not put into the same cubicles as men, although they might be on the same team as a non-religious man.”
He recounted one story where he was doing an evening round of the college when he recognized a woman from a computer science course who was doing her homework assignment in a classroom. It turned out she was not permitted to take her computer home, highlighting how their needs are different from the norm.
The Tal Women’s Campus will consist of four main buildings— aggregating to some 25,000 sq.m. (30,000 sq. yd.) of real estate. One of the buildings will be the Helmsley Foundation Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, named for New York real estate mogul Harry Helmsley.
To date, the trustees of the Helmsley Charitable Trust have disbursed some half a billion dollars to projects in Israel, much of it to hospitals. This building will house the nursing school, bio-informatics, health informatics, and nurse practitioners, including a simulation floor, where students can practice treating patients on $20-30,000 lifelike dolls.
“We want to make it a world-class lab, in which there will be an AI component,” Hershkowitz said, adding that the college was already in contact with Shaare Zedek Medical Center as well as HMOs (Kupot Cholim), with a view to serving the whole of Jerusalem.
It was an opportune time to speak to Hershkowitz as he was recently announced as the recipient of the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award.
“I came to Israel when I was 16 and fell in love with Jerusalem. I always wanted to live here; it was a childhood dream," he told JNS. "On the one hand you have the privilege to live here, but it comes with a responsibility. We’ve been given the opportunity again to live in our homeland; it’s a historical moment and we have to make the best of it.”
