Behind the Headlines: Simcha Dinitz Shares His Dream of an English University in Israel

An Israeli university teaching in English. Simcha Dinitz has nurtured this idea as his own private dream for years — ever since he served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington in the late 1970s.

Now, as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, he has the authority, the prestige and the resources to try and implement it. And as he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he has already set about it with vigor.

The universities of Tel Aviv and Beersheba have responded to his initial feelers with enthusiasm, he said in a Rosh Hashanah interview.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Dinitz served as vice president for five years until his election as chairman of the World Zionist Organization-Jewish Agency Executive earlier this year, is more stuffy and conservative.

But he believes they, too, will see “that this is a great idea” and indeed that the new university should be housed in the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus in West Jerusalem. Since most of Hebrew University has moved over the past two decades to its campus on Mount Scopus, in East Jerusalem, the Givat Ram location is only sparsely inhabited.

Dinitz said that two internationally known scholars are working on blueprints.

He himself proposes to get the ball rolling immediately after the High Holidays by convening a top-level confabulation of representatives from the government, WZO, Council for Higher Education and individual universities.

NOBEL LAUREATES

If the Hebrew University’s buildings are made available, he said, the envisioned university should be self-supporting, with students paying some $5,000 a year in tuition. This is a great deal more than the average in Israeli universities, Dinitz noted, but much less than the average private American university charges.

Dinitz would like to see two or three famed Jewish Nobel laureates attached to the teaching staff during the first year to give the unique institution a dramatic and prestigious start.

The university would strive for excellence, awarding degrees — first bachelor’s and, soon after, master’s — recognized and respected the world over.

Dinitz regards the project as the embodiment of what he believes must be the twin foci of Zionist effort at the end of the 20th century: Jewish education and some experience in Israel for as many young people in the Diaspora as possible.

With the language barrier removed, Dinitz reasons, Jewish youngsters could live and study here not merely for summer courses or one-year programs, but for a full university cycle.

“And they’d be learning Hebrew naturally, as part of living here. There would be friendships and marriages, and a great deal of eventual aliyah,” he said.

But all the students, regardless of where they eventually settle, would carry with them through life a profound and sustained Jewish Israeli learning experience.

For Dinitz, this same philosophy molds his approach to Soviet Jewry at this time of change and evolution in the Soviet Union as a whole, and for the Jewish community there in particular.

“I have never been afraid of changing my views,” he said when asked if his stress on Jewish education and culture inside the Soviet Union today vindicates the late Nahum Goldmann’s approach to Soviet Jewry 20 to 30 years ago.

‘ARCHAIC’ DEBATE ON ALIYAH

“We have to ask ourselves why there is so high a dropout rate, why there is so much alienation,” Dinitz stressed.

The answer, he said, throughout the Diaspora and all the more so in the Soviet Union after 70 years of communism, is to be found in cultural and spiritual emptiness and ignorance.

The hoary Zionist debate between aliyah, on the one hand, and building up Diaspora communities, on the other, is “archaic and irrelevant,” Dinitz asserted.

The two goals are in no way contradictory, but rather support and sustain each other. Zionism must be predicated on strong communities where knowledge of Jewish heritage and culture is widespread.

Dinitz, refreshingly frank and realistic, readily conceded that current Diaspora experience has shown that Jewishly well-educated Jews-on-the-move, from South Africa for instance, choose destinations other than Israel.

That proves, he said, not that education does not matter, “but that Jewish education is necessary but is not sufficient” to imbue young people with Zionist goals and values.

In addition, if aliyah from the free world is to grow, there has to be “a positive pull from Israel,” Dinitz said. This applies both to concrete matters of jobs and housing, and also to the less tangible but nevertheless vital area of “vision and drama.”

ONGOING HISTORIC DRAMA’

“I always speak to people abroad of Israel as an ongoing historic Jewish drama, and I challenge them: Don’t be a passive spectator. Come and participate actively in building a new society where a Jew can live Jewishly to the full.”

Dinitz recalled that “Zionism was always a minority movement.” He does not delude himself into thinking or talking of instant large-scale aliyah.

But he believes that the demographic proportions between Israel and the Diaspora can and will still change significantly in Israel’s favor in the foreseeable future.

As for Soviet Jewish emigration, Dinitz said he now favors direct flights via Romania, since “two parallel channels exist” for Jews leaving the USSR. They can apply to unite with their families in the United States and elsewhere, or they can apply to go to Israel.

Dinitz wants them “to exercise that free choice” while still in Russia, and not use “the Israeli visa as though it were a mere travel document to anywhere.”

He insists that in practice, today, the Soviet authorities do not distinguish between the two channels. In other words, he said, it is as easy to apply and leave for the West as for Israel.

That is why “my position is supported by most American Jewish leaders,” Dinitz said. The minority still opposing that position, he said, are “self-interest groups for whom processing immigrants in Vienna is itself a veritable raison d’etre.”