Bar-Ilan to open country’s 5th medical school in Safed

Ceremony will be broadcasted live on the BIU website at biu.ac.il/live; temporary campus will be replaced by permanent one in the future.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Silvan Shalom at Safed medical school groundbreaking 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Silvan Shalom at Safed medical school groundbreaking 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Israel’s fifth medical school – the first new one in nearly four decades – opens on Sunday in Safed.
Bar-Ilan University will officially open its Faculty of Medicine in the Galilee in the presence of the President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his whole cabinet, regional council heads, Galilee hospital directors, Council for Higher Education leaders and prominent business people.
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The event will begin at 11 a.m. with a ceremony marking the opening of the 2011-12 academic year.
Speakers will include Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar; Chairman of the Council for Higher Education’s planning and budgeting committee Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg; Bar-Ilan University President Prof. Moshe Kaveh; Prof. Haim Taitelbaum; and Prof. Ran Tur-Kaspa, the new dean of of the faculty of medicine.
The medical school is located on a temporary campus, but a new, permanent one will replace it.
The enterprise is expected not only to bring high-quality students and faculty to the Galilee, but also to raise the standard of medicine in hospitals in the region, as clinical studies will be held there.
Dozens of returning Israelis who completed the first few years of theoretical studies will begin their clinical work now, while the rest will begin their theoretical work in Safed.
The four older medical schools are in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba.
The ceremony marking the opening of the Faculty of Medicine in the Galilee will begin at noon. The ceremony will close with the unveiling of the medical school complex and Founders Wall, and the affixing of the mezuza.
The ceremony will be broadcasted live on the BIU website at biu.ac.il/live