Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

The story

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was founded in 1969, and since 1974 it has carried its present name. The road to it began years earlier and inside the city itself: in 1962 David Tuviyahu, the first mayor of Beersheba, proposed to Prof. Ernst David Bergmann and to a group with a vision that they establish a university in the Negev. From that year lectures were held in the city on behalf of the Weizmann Institute, the Technion and the Hebrew University, and from 1963 an association operated whose purpose was to found a university — the Institute for Higher Education in the Negev. In 1964 the Ministry of Education and Culture appointed a committee to examine the possibility. In 1965 the municipality bought Beit HIAS, a building that had previously been a hotel, so that it would serve the institute, and in that same year the first academic year opened in it. The University of the Negev was founded by the direction of the government of Israel in 1969 and opened in the academic year 5730; in June 1971 the name of the institution was officially changed from “the Institute for Higher Education in the Negev” to “the University of the Negev”, and in 1974, after the death of David Ben-Gurion, the board of trustees decided to name it after him. Prof. Haim Hanani was the first rector, in 1969, and Prof. Moshe Prywes the first president, in 1974. One of its gates is called the Gate of Peace. Today more than nineteen thousand students study in it in the faculties of natural sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences, medicine, health and management, and the Faculty of Health Sciences is located inside the compound of the Soroka hospital.

• Education
• People
• Brutalism
• Beersheba