Archive Photograph
Dr Syngalowski visiting the first ORT carpentry school in Jaffa, Israel, 1949. Archive Ref. p07a102
Archive Photograph
Bulgarian immigrant at the toolmaking school in Jaffa, Israel, c. 1950. Archive Ref. p04a316

ORT in Israel

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An ORT Tool Supply Corporation was established in the new State of Israel in May 1948. Later that year, Dr Syngalowski visited Israel and held meetings with Prime Minister Ben Gurion and other officials, leading to the establishment of ORT in the State of Israel in November 1948. The first school opened in Jaffa in March 1949.

Archive Photograph
Opening ceremony of the ORT School of Engineering in Jerusalem, Israel, 1976. Chaim Herzog listening to speeches, with Golda Meir, Joseph Harmatz and Daniel Mayer. Archive Ref. p16a001
Archive Photograph
Dedication of phase II of ORT College of Engineering in Jerusalem, 13 September 1982. Unveiling a plaque in memory of Jacob Oleiski. Archive Ref. p16a021

Over the next decades operations expanded throughout the country, with ORT playing a major role in shaping Israel’s workforce and responding to the country’s growing and changing needs. By the 1970s enrolment had risen to 70,000 in 140 schools. In 1976 the ORT School of Engineering in Jerusalem was inaugurated (later renamed after Joseph Harmatz, Director of ORT Israel and later Director General of World ORT). Another higher education technical college, the ORT Braude International Institute of Technology in Karmiel, opened its doors in 1988.

Since 2007, World ORT has operated in Israel as World ORT Kadima Mada implementing programmes that have raised standards of STEM education in underprivileged communities – Jewish and non-Jewish – in the country’s northern and southern peripheries.