Tekoah Installed As Ben Gurion, University President; Confirms Hezog Will Replace Him at UN

Yosef Tekoah, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations for the past seven years, was installed as president of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba yesterday amid speculation that he intends to participate in political as well as academic affairs. Tekoah was officially voted in as president by the university board of governors, In his acceptance speech he confirmed unofficial reports that his successor at the UN will be Brig, Gen . Haim Herzog, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence and a well known military commentator.

Tekoah said that he and his family would move to Beersheba shortly, Political pundits raised the possibility that he will use his position at Ben Gurion University to establish a personal political base in the Negev capital, especially among the academic community which is comprised of many new immigrants from the West and from the Soviet Union. Tekoah, an accomplished orator, is known to lean toward the former Rafi faction of the Labor Party whose leader is ex-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Political observers are convinced that he intends to enter the political arena on both the local and national level.

Tekoah succeeded Prof, Moshe Prywes who resigned from the presidency of Ben Gurion University to become dean of its medical faculty and active in the Central Negev Kupat Holim Hospital.

Harry T. Dozor, of Philadelphia, who was yesterday elected deputy chairman of the Ben Gurion University Board of Governors, announced a five-year pledge of $500,000 for the “Shirley and Harry Dozor Preparatory School.” Boris and Selma Margolin, of New York, endowed a $50,000 student scholarship at the university for graduate technical students. The Abrahams-Curiel family of London inaugurated the Abrahams-Curiel Lecture Hall toward which they contributed 50,000 Pounds Sterling.