THE LOUNGE

Ali Baba Group founder Jack Ma goes to TAU.

By MICHAL GALANTI
JOSEPH KLAFTER (left) and Jack Ma (photo credit: CHEN GALILI)
JOSEPH KLAFTER (left) and Jack Ma
(photo credit: CHEN GALILI)
1. Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv University awarded honorary degrees this past weekend as part of the Board of Governors’ 2018 events. Among the recipients of the honorary degrees this year were: Ali Baba Group founder Jack Ma; Bank of Israel Governor Dr. Karnit Flug; and journalist Ilana Dayan.
Batsheva Dance Company and philanthropist Lily Pfizer received the Honorary Fellow Award; and the Hugo Ramniceanu Prize in Economics was awarded to Dave Waiser, founder and CEO of Gett. The event was hosted by the president of the university, Professor Joseph Klafter.
Jack Ma made a special trip to Israel for the ceremony, together with another thirty Ali Baba executives. Before the ceremony, he met with Tel Aviv University students, and then gave a speech on behalf of all the recipients. According to Ma, “the State of Israel is a 70-year-old miracle. There’s not even one diamond here, but you have the best diamond exchange in the world. Your country has no natural resources, but you’ve turned Israel into a world power. People shouldn’t read about Israel in the newspapers – they should come here and see it from close up with their own eyes.”
2. Neopharm
In the Zappa Herzliya compound, David Forer, chairman and owner of the Neopharm Group and his wife, Michal, hosted the company’s 700 employees to mark Israel’s 70th Independence Day and Neopharm’s 77th anniversary. Company employees picked singer Omer Adam to perform at the event.
3. The Clock
Young Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art held a special event for the Friends of the Museum in which they noted their support for Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” curated by Suzanne Landau. The event was first conceived of by Sivan Sabag with inspiration from the ‘Mad Tea-Party’ in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and was attended by the Young Friends Chairman Jason Arison and his wife, Elital.
4. ChipEx2018
In a ceremony held at the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel, Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, received the 2018 Global Mobile Award at the ChipEx2018 Industry Conference for his contribution to the industry, vision and long-term achievements, which include the establishment of Mellanox, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solutions.
The award was presented by John Neuffer, CEO of the American Semiconductor Industry Association, and by the two chairmen of the ChipEx2018 Conference: Sol Gradman, CEO of ASG and conference creator, Ran Ginosar, head of the VLSI Research Center at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology. The list of past winners includes the founders of Broadcom and Qualcomm, senior executives from the chip industry including Apple and Intel, and professors from leading universities around the world.
5. Prophet Yitro
Alexander Landesberg, a controlling shareholder of Sano, and his son Yuval Landsberg, CEO of the company, were hosted by the Tarif family in the Druse villages of Julis and Yarka, on the occasion of the holiday of the Prophet Yitro.
Salman Tarif, a social activist who initiated the visit, spoke about the close friendship that has existed between the Landesberg and Tarif families for more than 50 years, which was originally forged by the late Bruno Landesberg, the founder of Sano, and Sheikh Kamel Tarif.
Translated by Hannah Hochner.