It is a great honor and a source of immense joy for me to receive the Scopus Prize from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I’d especially like to thank Gabriel Goldman for breaking the news to me upon his return from Israel. I must say that the surprising news left me taken aback. I certainly wasn’t expecting it.
It has always struck me that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded 23 years before the creation of the State of Israel, thanks to the vision of a group of pioneers from the Zionist Organization who dared to bring the issue to the table. It was undoubtedly an unexpected development, though it would be an understatement to attribute its uniqueness solely to that fact. From the launch of the project—almost unthinkable at the time—the university began to expand its activities, which today encompass virtually all areas of human knowledge, and became a driving force for innovation. Its classrooms have produced Nobel Prize winners and recipients of other major awards within Israel; Dr. Seroussi, whom we have just heard from, is one of them. Today, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ranks among the world’s best universities in every ranking.
Education has always been central to the aspirations of the Jewish people, who have fought tenaciously to preserve and spread Jewish thought and their way of life, while remaining passionately engaged in the major social, cultural, and technological changes taking place around the world.
138 years ago, the same spirit inspired a group of thinkers in Tsarist Russia. They were the pioneers of the ORT project, which sought to rescue Jewish communities confined to exclusion zones through vocational education as a means of liberation. Thus, ORT was founded in 1880.
Ten thousand letters requesting support for the project were sent out, and the response exceeded all expectations, enabling the rapid launch of the ORT initiative, a Movement in Jewish Life.
Both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and ORT succeeded in attracting the attention of Albert Einstein and other prominent figures, who supported both projects from their inception. Albert Einstein delivered the inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the day of its opening, and a few years later he attended a fundraising dinner for ORT at the Savoy Hotel in London, accompanied by George Bernard Shaw. I have an iconic photo of that event on my desk.
Our institutions owe a great deal to all those tenacious visionaries and generous figures from the scientific community and the Jewish world of that era who supported these two great dreams.
Today, there is an academic cooperation agreement between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Universidad ORT Uruguay, which we hope will serve as a basis for developing projects that benefit both countries.
My generation, which experienced firsthand the brutal and criminal persecution of Nazism in occupied Europe, was “viscerally bound” to the Shoah (a term coined by Claude Lanzmann) and left with an indelible, tragic wound. The creation of the State of Israel was of indescribable significance, particularly for the survivors. Faced with global apathy toward the genocide, we had hoped that, with the end of the war, the active or passive collaboration of the “Mitläufer”—a term used by the Franco-German journalist Geraldine Schwarz in her recent book *The Amnesiacs*, referring to followers of Nazism—would disappear. Our loneliness, helplessness, and vulnerability would be a thing of the past. To a large extent, and despite persistent pockets of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, the existence of the State of Israel allowed us to regain the dignity and dreams that had been taken from us.
Seventy years later, the State of Israel remains a striking reality, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem stands as one of its finest symbols and achievements.
I would like to thank Dr. Seroussi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Goldman and friends at the Hebrew University in Uruguay, my family in Uruguay—Carolina, Victoria, Florencia, Matías, Laura, and Fabiana—those living in Israel, the U.S., and Mexico, and especially my brother Raymond, of blessed memory, who stood by me during the darkest years; Ruperto Long, my biographer and friend; to my colleague and friend Dr. Adrián Moscowicz, Executive Director of ORT Argentina; to my son Jorge, a pillar of support when we embarked on the major challenge of the university project; to my husband José for supporting my endeavors; to my colleagues and friends at ORT Uruguay; and to all of you here today.
To Israel’s new ambassador, Ms. Galit Ronen, to whom we wish every success in her mission in our country.
I am deeply honored to be here today at this event.
Thank you very much.