The academic year is starting these days in Israel, and this time our historical album is dedicated to the early days of the Technion (today's Israel Institute of Technology).
In 1907, Dr. Paul Nathan, the founder of the German company Ezrah, came on a visit to Palestine. He noticed that the Ottoman Empire had begun to initiate large development projects and suffered from a lack of people with sufficient technical skills. He came up with the idea of establishing a college of technical studies, whose graduates would later participate in these projects. He chose to set up the institution's building in Haifa even though it was at that time, a small city. Nathan predicted that Haifa would become an industrial and transportation hub, due to the fact that it hosted a central railway junction and that there existed a plan to expand the Haifa port.
In 1912, the foundations to the building were laid, but the construction work extended over a long time and was accompanied by many difficulties. In addition to budget problems, an argument broke amongst the people of the Yishuv about the language of teaching at the Technion. Paul Nathan intended it to be German, but many people insisted that it should be Hebrew. This argument was called “The Language War” and at the end of it, the Ezrah Company decided that the teaching language would be Hebrew.
The construction work was delayed again after World War I began. The Ezrah Company ran into financial difficulties and the WZO bought the Technion’s unfinished building. The construction of the building was finished on 1924, and a year later the formal studies at the Technion began.