The Institute for Negev Research

The story

The Institute for Negev Research was founded in Beersheba in October 1957, on the initiative of David Ben-Gurion, as part of the Prime Minister's Office. Its purpose was defined by Ben-Gurion himself in his greeting for the opening, on 28 October 1957: “Only researchers who sit at the gate of the Negev and devote all their days to the research of the Negev will uncover its secrets for the sake of making the wilderness bloom”. The institute began its path with attempts to develop installations for the desalination of brackish water — that is, with a problem that is itself the story of the city. Its first director, Arieh El-Tzur, recruited researchers, technicians, laboratory workers and service staff from among the people of the various diasporas who came to Beersheba at that time; from 1961 Yoel Shechter directed it. At the end of the 1960s Professor Sidney Loeb was recruited to the desalination project, and he developed here the method of reverse osmosis — the technology that is used today for the desalination of water all over the world, and for which new uses have been found in our time also in the production of electricity. Most of the institute's researchers were biologists: some of them dealt with plants and some with animals, always facing the problems that the Negev poses — a shortage of water and high temperatures. In the middle of the 1950s the population of Beersheba numbered fewer than twenty thousand residents and it had only one high school, and even so David Tuviyahu, the first mayor, expressed his confidence that a university would rise in it; the institute was one of the bases from which it grew.

• Water and wells
• Education
• People
• Beersheba