New university opens near Israel’s northernmost city, hoping to boost war-battered region

A new Israeli university opened its doors near the northern tip of the country on Tuesday, injecting the war-battered Galilee with a new center for research and education that aims to also provide a shot in the arm to the area’s beleaguered economy.

The new school, formally named Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee, was until this year the Tel-Hai Academic College in the Galilee Panhandle, a small area surrounded by the border with Lebanon. Its transformation into a university marks the culmination of a government plan first hatched in 2005 to bring a university to the area. It is now Israel’s 11th university, joining others located in cities across the country.

Becoming a university means Tel-Hai can conduct substantial academic research in addition to teaching. It also means that over the next five years, the student body is slated to grow from around 5,000 to 8,000, while the faculty doubles from 150 to 300.

“From now on, for the faculty members, part of their daily work will be research, including instructing students for higher degrees — master’s and doctorates,” Professor Eyal Shimoni, the university’s deputy vice president for research and development, told The Times of Israel. “The moment we open up the university, consider that whoever was a lecturer is now also a researcher, who suddenly has three, four, five, six people in their research group, and their families.”

That expansion comes as the north is emerging from three years of on-and-off war with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which barraged the border region with rockets and mortars beginning the day after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack and continuing, with intermittent truces, until the middle of this year.

The rocket fire led to the evacuation of much of the region, including the nearby city of Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, and has depressed its economy and its daily life. At the university, enrollment is at 5,000, back to prewar levels, up from 4,700 last year and 4,400 in the war’s first year, when studies were remote. Seventy percent of the students are from outside the school’s region, it said.

Now, Shimoni said, the university hopes to attract companies and tech firms to the area to catalyze its economic recovery, along with providing more jobs itself.

“We essentially understand that one of the most significant things we can do is to contribute to companies and industry coming to the Galilee,” Shimoni said. “We don’t see ourselves as a university that just happens to be located somewhere and is teaching. We have a greater mission.”

Although the plan to establish the university began in 2005, the campus is now kicking off a five-year period in which it is meant to expand its offerings, its students and its faculty. The government has invested NIS 700 million ($225 million) in the effort, according to the university, and earlier this year KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund announced an investment of $5 million in a new agritech center in Kiryat Shmona, in partnership with the university.

The university is opening with four departments: social sciences and humanities; life and environmental sciences; education and teaching; and engineering and advanced computing. A range of government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Education Minister Yoav Kisch and Minister Ze’ev Elkin, came to the school for its opening day.

“We are doing a historic thing here. This is a day of blessing, a day of good news for Kiryat Shmona, for the Galilee,” said Netanyahu at the inauguration.

“I am convinced that we will have an excellent university that will serve as an anchor for the flourishing of the entire region,” Dr. Eliezer Shalev, the university’s president, said in a statement. “We are not just establishing an academic institution; we are building a strategic national and social anchor connected to the roots of this place.”

Being in the area also comes with ongoing challenges, not least of which is the threat of another round of conflict with Hezbollah. While Shimoni acknowledged that evacuating research equipment and supplies, and asking students to study remotely, will be a heavier lift now that the campus is a university, he is confident that it will still be able to grow.

The key, he said, is recruiting top-notch faculty, a process that he said is already underway. Most of the new recruits came from postdoctoral positions abroad, the school said.

“We’re recruiting excellent academic faculty, competing with the best universities in the country over the best people, and at the end of the day, some of them chose to come to us, and that in my view is the most important part,” he said. “If we bring a strong faculty, the students will vote with their feet.”