A Potential Torah University

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
JPost
05 September 09

When the visionary, Vienna-born physicist Prof. Ze'ev Lev (William Low) established the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) 40 years ago with seven engineering students in an apartment building in the Bayit Vegan quarter, he dreamed of the day when there would be 400 or 500 students. Those familiar with his dream of teaching high-level science and engineering combined with Torah to modern Orthodox and haredi men doubt that Lev actually believed such a goal could be reached.

Lev somehow foresaw that this combination was exactly what 21st-century Jerusalem would need to fight the decline in the number of modern Orthodox residents, the high poverty rate, the minimal levels of secular education in haredi families and the capital's need for a strong technological base.

When Lev's former physics student at the Hebrew University, Prof. Joseph Bodenheimer, was named JCT's fourth president 16 years ago, that target had already been achieved, with 440 students in six buildings on the Givat Mordechai campus. Today, as he hands over the president's chair to eminent French-born mathematician Prof. Noah Dana-Picard, there are 3,000 students on campuses in Jerusalem and Ramat Gan, and 17 buildings on the main Givat Mordechai campus alone.

WHEN I interviewed him in 1993 upon his promotion from JCT rector to president (as I have interviewed the three presidents before him), I was impressed to find Bodenheimer sitting in the secretary's room rather than that of his predecessor, Dr. Yitzhak Nebenzahl (who needed the larger room due to a physical disability). Bodenheimer explained that the very pinched financial situation of the college required the president to serve as an example of modesty, so he remained in the small room, with its simple office furniture, for 16 years. "It is very satisfying when a new student tells me that his father studied here," he says.

Born in Cambridge, he moved with his parents to London during World War II and then in 1950 to Israel, where his father worked as an analytical chemist. After religious high school studies and military service, he was offered a prestigious Fulbright fellowship - one of three in Israel among 300 candidates - but Bodenheimer was hesitant to spend four years in the US. His father sent him to Lev at the Hebrew University for advice.

"He said that if I was good enough to win a Fulbright fellowship, I should go to HU, which was as good as any US university. I could always do post-graduate work in the US, Prof. Lev insisted." In the end, Bodenheimer earned all three degrees at HU and did post-doctoral work at the Kings College in London, where he studied electrooptics during its early years as a discipline.

After his return with his wife and three children, "Prof. Lev called me into his HU office and said he was opening a unique new institution and that he wanted me to set up the physics lab. He was concerned that I might not find a position here after my work abroad, as there were very few available job slots. He was intent on enabling national religious and haredi yeshiva students to study engineering in a Torah framework."

SURPRISINGLY, all the leading rabbis gave their approval after Lev - "a genius and an incredible thinker" - agreed to call the religious studies component a beit midrash rather than a yeshiva, and since then, no rabbinical prohibitions or boycotts have ever been declared against JCT.
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