Beit Yatziv

The story

Beit Yatziv is an educational and community center in the west of Beersheba, on the Gustav Levan campus, and is named after Yitzhak Yatziv. The plot had to do with education even before there was an institution here: in 1921, at the end of the First World War and in days of unemployment, a tent camp of Jewish pioneers stood at the place. The Zionist Commission of the Zionist Organization, the representative of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, won the tender for the building of the military cemeteries, and on its behalf three groups of pioneers built the British military cemetery in Beersheba — one of the largest of its kind in the country. The Mandate government confirmed their work in writing: “The work has been carried out by you in a satisfactory manner. The work as a whole is good”, and in the eyes of the workers this was an achievement of Hebrew labor. At the end of 1953 Beit Yatziv was established at the place, a youth hostel alongside a study center. Among the initiators of the founding were Avraham Herzfeld and Gershon Ostrovsky, who managed the institution from the day of its founding for decades; the ownership is that of the Rashi Foundation and of the Beersheba municipality. In 1994, following the Shenhar report and the Kremnitzer report, the Ministry of Education chose Beit Yatziv as one of the two national centers for teacher training courses — the one at Shlomi for science and technology, and this one here for the subjects of Judaism, civics and society, in boarding conditions. In 2007 an astronomy center began to operate in it, and on the roof of the main building a robotic telescope eight inches in diameter was placed alongside mobile telescopes; in 2008 the program for scientific leadership was added, in which middle school and high school pupils in the Negev study and teach in the lower grades. At the eastern end of the compound, in the Ottoman building of the School for Bedouin Children, the Carasso Science Park has operated since 2013.

• British Mandate
• Education
• Beersheba