Three Tau Professors win 1999 Israel Prize
TAU Professor Emeritus Menahem Banitt, a renowned linguist and philologist specializing in Old French, was awarded the Israel Prize for 1999. His thirty-year research of Biblical glossaries compiled by Jews in medieval France represents a treasure chest for Hebrew and French scholars alike.
Born in Belgium in 1914, Menahem Banitt grew up in a bilingual household (Flemish/Yiddish) and exhibited an aptitude for languages at an early age. His work bridges two fields - French linguistics and Jewish studies. This linkage reflects his own special training: he holds a doctorate in Romance languages and is equally steeped in Jewish studies, having studied for the rabbinate. His authoritative work, Rashi: Interpreter of the Biblical Letter, is considered a landmark in research on the medieval Jewish rabbinical leader.
Prof. Banitt joined the faculty of TAU in 1966 and was the founder of the Department of French. At the urging of the late Prof. Ephraim Urbach, former president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Banitt began studying the corpus of Hebrew, French and German glossaries of the Middle Ages - sources found in libraries in Basel, Paris, Parma and Leipzig.
Philological find
Prof. Banitt's renown as a scholar of French language and culture is based on his major accomplishment: deciphering the Leipzig Glossaries - a rare, voluminous work preserved in the Leipzig University Library.
Written on fine parchment and embellished with small illustrations, the manuscript contains the entire Bible from Genesis to Second Chronicles in Hebrew, accompanied by rabbinical commentary - much based on Rashi. Additional interpretations, written by some 30 Jewish scholars from the little-known Rouen rabbinical school in the capital of Normandy, are also present. The manuscript illuminates the rich fabric of Torah study in France prior to the expulsion of Jews from that country in 1306, as well as the way Hebrew was used by Jews in France during the Middle Ages.
The uniqueness of the volumes, however, is that the Hebrew text is accompanied by two columns containing translations - or glossaries - of Biblical terms and phrases, one in Old French and the other in a German dialect from which Yiddish would emerge. The 22,000 French terms or titles were part of the original document that dates back to the 13th century; the German was added after the expulsion and constitutes an archetype of the Yiddish version of the Bible.
Translations of Biblical terms into the vernacular French - or le'azim as they are called - were written in voweled Hebrew script because the authors considered Latin characters an abomination associated with Christianity. The highly phonetic Hebrew is a tremendous boon for modern linguists in understanding the real pronunciation of words in the Old Norman dialect. Furthermore, the Leipzig Glossaries are rich in Old French vocabulary concerning daily life and culture - for example the parts of a cow, the names of agricultural tools, the nomenclature of plants, and so forth. Some Biblical terms are even translated into four or five French words, depending on usage, revealing a wider range of connotations for the French than set down in Old French dictionaries.
Decorated by France
Prof. Banitt's work has generated tremendous excitement in France - all the way up to the President of the French Republic. Already in 1967, Prof. Banitt was honored with the prestigious French award, Officier des Palmes Academiques, in recognition of his role in strengthening cultural ties between Israel and France.
Prof. Banitt, at age 84, continues his life's work with other Hebrew-French Biblical glossaries penned by French Jews during the Middle Ages. To date, he has completed the majority of the Parma glossary as well.
CREATING A CINEMATIC LANGUAGE
Cited for his "unique vision and ability to observe the Israeli experience from the inside," Prof. David Perlov of TAU's Department of Film and Television, Katz Faculty of the Arts, was awarded the 1999 Israel Prize for Cinema.
This is the first time in 24 years that Israel's highest honor has been awarded to a film maker.
The son of a Brazilian circus magician, David Perlov was recognized by the Israel Prize judges as one of the founding fathers of Israeli cinema, the architect of its language, the first to win international recognition for it, and above all, the teacher of a whole generation.
"A quarter of a century ago," Perlov recounts, "a group of film makers came together at Tel Aviv University and created something new - Israel's first and only academic film department. Professionalization, I strongly believed, would make us better and lead to new directions. The Department is by now well-established. Our biannual Student Film Festival has grown to be an important international event, capped by workshops conducted by great masters such as Marcello Mastroianni and Istvan Szabo.
"Now I create through my students," Perlov continues. "Those who are not from the mainstream are the most promising. The Orthodox, Sephardic Jews, Russian immigrants: they will usher us into new perceptions."
Roots in Safed
Perlov was born into a family of contrasting personalities: his grandfather came from an old Chassidic dynasty of Safed; his father was an itinerant magician and silent film actor. Perlov grew up in poverty in Belo Horizonte, a provincial town in Brazil. "I learned to read and write very late. In fact, I dropped out of high school."
At 22, he left for Paris. "Paris was the best university one could have in cinematography," he reflects. "You worked with a master to learn the profession."
After an interlude at an Israeli kibbutz, he moved to Tel Aviv to follow his calling. The Histadrut Labor Federation commissioned a public relations film about its senior citizens homes. "They meant to show how happy those folks were. I showed a different picture - one that included death. They didn't like it." Other films followed, and with them, international recognition and awards.
Cinematic self-portrait
Perlov's greatest artistic achievement was also his most personal creation, Diary, a six-hour documentary on his and his family's day-to-day experience of life in Israel. He began filming it on the Day of Atonement in 1973 - at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. When it was premiered ten years later, the film was widely regarded as the most important creative work in the history of Israeli cinema. In Diary, a link between the private and the national, the introspective and the reality outside, was engendered.
"I was jealous of writers," Prof. Perlov explains. "They are able to chronicle their life, something apparently impossible on film. I took up the challenge and filmed the sights and sounds of the apparently irrelevant events of my life - the room, the streets, conversations with friends, news announcements on television, my daughter coming home from the war, the return to the places I knew in Brazil and Paris. It is a real diary, not an excuse to make a film. Tel Aviv University, its Department of Film and Television, is in there, in every chapter. Simply, because it is my life."
Prof. Perlov created a new format, or as the Israel Prize panel articulated it, "a rich and original cinematic language." "That," Perlov elucidates, "is about the hardness of the light, the strength of the contrasts, the expressions in the faces, and the tragic tone hovering above, unspoken but felt."
Hailed as the "mother of nursing in Israel," Professor Emeritus Rebecca Bergman of TAU's School of Health Professions, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, was awarded the Israel Prize for 1999 in recognition of her role in revolutionizing nursing education in Israel.
Prof. Bergman, who immigrated from Canada to Eretz Israel in 1936, is a founding member of the School and its Department of Nursing, which this year celebrated its 30th anniversary.
Prof. Bergman's sixty-year nursing career has been multifaceted - first as a caretaker in community and hospital-based care, later in academia as an educator and scholar at TAU, and ultimately as a recognized authority in public health policy-making. Her work with WHO, as Vice President of the International Council of Nurses, and her many speaking appearances at international conferences and foreign universities catapulted Israeli nursing into the international arena.
The transformation of nursing from an "appendage to the medical profession" into a bone fide and independent profession was achieved by progressively opening up academia to nurses - first on an undergraduate level for registered nurses, and later on a graduate level for nurses training to be educators, administrators and researchers in the field. Under Prof. Bergman's leadership, TAU played a pioneering role as the first Israeli university to establish a degree program in nursing. She was also one of the founding members of the School of Health Professions at TAU.
Two "firsts"
Prof. Bergman holds the double distinction of having been the first Israeli nurse to earn a doctorate and, now, the first one to be awarded the Israel Prize. She and her colleagues feel that the Prize radiates beyond individual recognition and enhances the stature of the nursing profession as a whole.
Much of Prof. Bergman's professional career has focused on teamwork. Her doctorate formulated a new model of nursing based on knowledge-based allocation of duties among registered nurses, practical nurses and nurses' aides. Other endeavors have lead to the redefinition of the doctor-nurse relationship as a partnership and to improved collaboration between hospital care and community services.
Academization has brought nurses (and, in parallel, physical and occupational therapists) into the circle of health professionals who can and should engage in scientific research, Prof. Bergman stresses. Nurses have begun "asking the questions the profession should be asking itself" - a status once solely the prerogative of physicians and social scientists. Research is the cornerstone for broadening community-based health services in lieu of hospital care - particularly for the elderly, one of the challenges facing society today, she says.
Sensitivity training
Another contribution of Prof. Bergman to her profession was the recognition of the "humanistic side of nursing." Courses in psychology, sociology, and anthropology nurture sensitivity and respect for the patient as an individual - an outlook Rebecca Bergman says she forged in her early years of nursing, assisting DPs during and after WWII, caring for IDF casualties in Israel's War of Independence, and helping new immigrants in the 1950s. This credo became an integral part of the nursing curriculum at TAU.
In the past decade, Prof. Bergman has focused on two areas: evaluation of nursing education and human resources management; and gerontology, particularly ethical and moral dilemmas concerning quality of life among the chronically ill and aged. Her interest in gerontology was shared with her late husband, TAU Professor Simon Bergman of TAU's Shapell School of Social Work, who was considered the "father" of gerontology as an area of specialization among care-givers.
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