On Tuesday, 27 December 2005, on the third night of Hanukkah, four new members were inducted into the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at a festive ceremony held in the presence of the President of the State of Israel, Mr. Moshe Katzav. The four, professors at several universities in Israel, were elected to membership by the Academy’s members in plenary session.

 

The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a statutory body established by law of the Knesset in 1961, is the most distinguished body in Israel’s scholarly community. Its purpose is to bring together Israel’s finest scholars and scientists, to nurture and promote scholarly and scientific activity, and to advise the government in matters of national importance in the area of research and planning for the country’s system of higher education. Ninety distinguished scholars are members of the Academy, fifty of them in the Section of Natural Sciences and forty in the Section of Humanities and Social Sciences.

 

Prof. Margalit Finkelberg, Head of the Classics Department at Tel Aviv University, is a first-rank scholar of ancient Greece, with an international reputation in the field of the literature and religion of ancient Greece.

 

Prof. Jacob Klein, of the Departments of Hebrew Language and Bible at Bar Ilan University, is among the world’s most distinguished scholars of Sumerian culture. His crowning contribution to the field of Mesopotamian literature is his comprehensive collection of Sumerian and Akkadian literary sources, with a translation into Hebrew prepared in collaboration with the poet S. Shifra.

 

Prof. Michel Revel is affiliated with the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. His studies have broken new ground in medicine, in the areas of protection against infectious diseases (such as hepatitis and herpes) and auto-immune diseases (such as multiple sclerosis), and they have provided a scientific foundation for the development of a medical biotechnology industry in Israel.

 

Prof. Yossi Shiloh of the Department of Molecular and Biochemical Genetics in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University is among Israel’s pioneers in the study of human molecular genetics. He has contributed greatly to the study of cell responses to elements that cause damage to DNA molecules and of the genetics of cancer.