The founding symposium for the David Bornblum Chair in Land of Israel Studies was held Tuesday at Kinneret College, located 20 kilometers south of Tiberias at the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee.
More than 250 students, faculty and friends of the Bornblum family gathered at the lakeside college's auditorium for a day of lectures on Jewish settlement in the Galilee and on the life of Israel's founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion (1886-1973).
Prof. Yaacov Goldstein, holder of the Bornblum Chair, delivered the keynote address. Rarely glancing at his notes, Prof. Goldstein captivated the audience for over an hour, giving an overview of Jewish settlement efforts in the Galilee during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Bert Bornblum, who flew in from Memphis, Tenn, for the ceremony, dedicated the chair in memory of his late younger brother David. The two were the only members of a large Polish Jewish family that escaped Europe before the Holocaust. With $10 to their name and a railroad ticket from Warsaw to Hamburg, Germany, the two brothers set out in 1937 for the United States.
Arriving in Memphis, the Bornblum brothers opened a clothing business and dedicated themselves to trying to rescue other family members caught in Nazi-occupied Europe. But their efforts were in vain. Both David and Bert Bornblum joined the US army during World War II; David fought in the South Pacific, while Bert was stationed in Europe.
A strong supporter of Jewish education, Bert Bornblum previously dedicated the Jewish Studies department at Memphis University, as well as a Solomon Shechter school for Jewish Studies in the local community.
Regarding the move of his philanthropic activity to an Israeli institution of higher learning, Bert said that it gives him "great personal satisfaction" and is a "partial fulfillment" of his Zionist education. Even as a teenager in the Polish Zionist youth group HaShomer Hatzair, he had great admiration for David Ben Gurion and was stirred to activism by his speeches, he noted.
The elder but young-spirited philanthropist was so moved by the dedication ceremony that during the coffee break, his eyes suddenly lit up, and he spontaneously broke out singing "Artza alinu," a song of the Zionist pioneers that he sang 70 years earlier in HaShomer Hatzair.
The Bornblum Chair will advance scholarly research in the field of the People of Israel in the Land of Israel. Symposiums are planned for the public, as well as seminars promoting academic research.
Prof Goldstein founded the Land of Israel Studies Department at the University of Haifa and headed it for many years. In his keynote address, he spoke of the arrival in Safed of the famous kabbalist mystic Isaac Luria (1534-1572), known in Hebrew as the Arizal. The town quickly turned into the main focal point of Jewish settlement in the Galilee. But following a series of earthquakes and other tragedies in Safed, he explained, the Jewish demographic center of the Galilee shifted to Tiberias in the 1830s.
Prof. Goldstein also expounded upon the fierce debate between early Zionists over which region of the country deserved priority in allocation of resources. He noted Ben Gurion's adamant opposition to drying up the Hula Valley swamps north of the Sea of Galilee before first settling the Jordan Valley. Ben Gurion envisioned that a Jewish presence in the Jordan Valley would lead to settlements on the east bank of the Jordan River in what today is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Kinneret College caters primarily to students from the Sea of Galilee area, including enrollees from the religious towns in the Golan Heights. Some 30 percent of the student body comes from other parts of Israel.
