Thousands of people gathered at the opening ceremony: the future President of Israel Chaim Weizmann, poet Chaim Bialik, Lord Balfour, the author of the famous declaration, Chief Rabbi Abraham Kook, and British Commissioner Herbert Samuel. They laid not just a building, but the foundation of the Jewish people’s intellectual life. The idea of the university was born at the end of the 19th century at Zionist congresses, where dreamers like Tzvi Hermann Shapira saw it as the heart of knowledge in Hebrew.

The university’s journey began even before its official opening. In 1923, Albert Einstein, a fervent supporter of the project, visited Palestine and delivered a lecture on the theory of relativity in one of the first buildings on Mount Scopus. The university was not yet operational — it was being prepared for launch, and the visit of the great physicist symbolized support for the Zionist dream. Later, he donated his manuscripts, including the General Theory of Relativity, to the university’s archive.

Over the century, the Hebrew University has gone through trials that reflected the fate of Israel itself. After the War of Independence in 1948, the campus on Mount Scopus was cut off, and classes had to be moved to various corners of Jerusalem. A new campus grew in Givat Ram, and after the Six-Day War in 1967, Mount Scopus once again became the center of university life.

Today, it is a global academic leader, ranked among the top hundred universities in the world according to the Shanghai Ranking. It has educated seven Nobel laureates, including physicist David Gross and chemists Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover, and Ada Yonath — people whose discoveries have changed science. About 23,000 students — from undergraduates to PhD candidates, including foreigners — study across six campuses from Jerusalem to Eilat, covering everything from medicine to ecology.

The Hebrew University is more than an educational institution. It is the embodiment of the Zionist idea that the Jewish people are capable not only of surviving but also of creating for the benefit of the world. A hundred years ago, words of hope were spoken on a simple stage. Today, they have become a reality that continues to grow on Mount Scopus.