Survival Through Brainpower

The grass grows wild on Mount Scopus in Arab Jordan. Rain drips through the roofs of empty classrooms.

What was built before 1948 as a model campus for Hebrew University is now a forlorn and uninhabited neutral zone within sight of Israeli Jerusalem.

Once a fortnight, by United Nations authorization, a truck enters Mount Scopus, loads books from among the 250,000 that remain in the abandoned library, returns via the Mandelbaum Gate and takes its cargo to a striking new 250-acre campus that crowns the Judean Hills of Israel. There, in buildings made of pink limestone quarried on the site, Hebrew University is in the midst of a flourishing rebirth.

The student body, 870 in 1948, now numbers 10,000. Ground was broken last month for a new school of social work, latest in a series of fast-rising buildings for physics, chemistry, den tistry, law. Nearing completion is a $10 million medical school complex. The just-finished library houses 2,000,000 books and such treasures as Einstein's handwritten manuscript of the theory of relativity, a 1,600-volume collection of Lincolniana, and the private library of Serge Koussevitzky.

The Nation's Engine. In a land that lacks industrial resources, Hebrew Uni versity is the engine of the nation. "Our survival depends on the quality of our brains," says President Eliahu Elath, a noted Orientalist and former Israeli Ambassador to Washington and Lon don. "This university must help pre serve that quality or else we are lost." Students and faculty have a sense of direction that most U.S. colleges would find awesome. Professors publish or perish on the theory, bluntly stated by Humanities Dean Joshua Prawer, that "where there is a choice between a good scholar or a good teacher, we will always take the scholar." The average freshman is 21 years old and-whether man or woman-an army veteran. Students prefer chess to soccer.

The last prank took place a few years ago, when students painted a red and yellow dress on a Henry Moore sculpture. The university has no rules against drinking on campus because no one drinks anything stiffer than orange juice.

"Maybe a little alcohol would liven them up," says Acting Dean of Students Esther Reifenberg.

Students at Hebrew University are mostly Israelis solemnly intent on going into government or the professions. But one in every ten is an "oriental" Jew from the Middle East, North Africa or Asia; 200 others are Arabs living in Israel, some of them fervently pro-Nasser. The largest foreign contingent is 250 students from the U.S., and 100 others come from black African nations. Students are supposed to read English, but most teaching is in Hebrew.

Recently an Israeli was surprised to see two Africans conversing in Hebrew, but the explanation was logical. "He's from French-speaking Cameroun and I'm from Liberia," said one of the pair.

"Hebrew is our common language." International Flavor. Hebrew University takes its standards from a long, international tradition of scholarship.

Among its founders 40 years ago were Philosopher Martin Buber and Chemist Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first President. Sigmund Freud and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo served on the board of governors. Working at the school now are such scholars as German-born Gynecologist Bernhard Zondek, co-discoverer of the A-Z test for pregnancy; Yigael Yadin, Dead Sea Scrolls expert and former chief of staff of the Israeli Army; and Monetary Theorist Don Patinkin, one of the Americans who comprise 10% of the university's full professors.

The university has other links to the U.S. Washington pours money into it, in the form of research contracts, on a scale that many a U.S. school could envy. The projects, worth $2,000,000 this year, include research in botany for the U.S. Agriculture Department, solid state physics for the Defense Department, radiation for the Atomic Energy Commission, and improvement of lie detector tests for the U.S. Air Force. U.S. Jewry also contributes heavily to the university; though the Israeli government supplies 60% of the school's operating budget of $11 million, most of the balance, as well as the major chunk of its $53 million construction drive, has been collected in the U.S.

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