The Jortner Committee and the Failed Attempt to Establish the University of the Galilee in Safed, 1971

This article addresses the attempt to establish The University of the Galilee in Safed under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University in the early 1970s. The new university was intended to be a focal point for accelerated development in the eastern Galilee, as in the case of Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, which was established a few years earlier. I will present the academic and local actors who promoted the idea of the University of the Galilee and their objectives and how they envisioned fulfilling the new university’s goals and reaching its target audiences, which included students from northern Israel and young immigrants from Jewish communities worldwide. The academic faculty was expected to originate primarily from Bar-Ilan University. I will discuss the deliberations of Professor Joshua Jortner’s committee, which examined the matter on behalf of the Council for Higher Education (CHE) and decided that the establishment of the university in Safed would be undertaken by the CHE rather than assigning the task to Bar-Ilan University. At the same time, in 1972, the Israeli government decided that no new academic institutions would be established. This policy decision aligned with the stance of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which advocated a shift from the accelerated academic development characterizing the first two decades of the state to a policy of restraint and prudence in the opening of new research universities. This policy would go on to shape Israel’s higher education landscape for the next five decades.