H eadlines
IIA, Jefferson Team Up for Biotech Contest
L O CAL
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
THOMAS JEFFERSON
University is partnering with
the Israel Innovation Authority
(IIA) on a competition for
Israeli biotech and life science
companies that will provide $1
million in total prizes to be
devoted toward research and
development for four winning
applicants, according to a joint
announcement on Feb. 12.

The competition will seek
out Israeli companies focused
on new, innovative technolo-
gies in areas like virtual reality,
artificial intelligence, wearable
tech and more.

“This is something that we’ve
been bringing together for six,
eight years,” Zvi Grunwald said.

Grunwald, an Israeli citizen
born to Holocaust survivors,
has been at Jefferson for more
than 20 years, serving as a pro-
fessor of anesthesiology and
as chair of that department
within the Sidney Kimmel
Medical College; as of last
July, he is now the James D.

Wentzler professor and emer-
itus chair, along with his post
as the executive director of the
Jefferson Israel Center.

This new project, he said,
is not only emblematic of the
relationship that Jefferson con-
tinues to foster with medical
students and professionals
in Israel, but “is itself part of
a much larger vision of the
global Jefferson that we are cre-
ating now.”
The Jefferson Israel Center
was launched in June, the
third such international center
founded by the Philadelphia
medical center. According to
a press release then, the goal
was to “expand collaborative
research ties with more Israeli
academic centers, encompassing
all of its medical schools, as well
as the forefront Israeli biomedi-
cal innovation incubators.”
At the time, the announce-
ment also pledged to “scale-up
joint ventures with Israeli
companies, by leveraging
Jefferson’s unique co-develop-
ment business model and the
substantial scale of its rapidly
growing clinical care footprint
and clinical trials consortium.”
Besides the general desire
for greater global reach and
collaboration, Grunwald said,
it is Israel in particular that
provides enticing opportuni-
ties to Jefferson.

“Israel today is what Silicon
Valley was in the late 1990s. It’s
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8 FEBRUARY 21, 2019
JEWISH EXPONENT
From left: Mark Tykocinski; Ami Appelbaum, chairman of the board of
the Israel Innovation Authority; and Zvi Grunwald, executive director of
the Jefferson Israel Center
Photo provided
Israel today is what Silicon Valley was in the
late 1990s. It’s an ecosystem of innovation.”
MARK L. TYKOCINSKI
an ecosystem of innovation that
has more technology startups
per capita than anywhere in the
world right now,” said Mark L.

Tykocinski, provost and execu-
tive vice president at Jefferson
and the Anthony F. and
Gertrude M. DePalma Dean
of the Sidney Kimmel Medical
College, at the announcement
of the Jefferson Israel Center
last June. “In an increasingly
global academic ecosystem, the
opportunities are unbounded
for leveraging international
institutional partnerships to
innovate science and profes-
sional training, and in so doing,
to give life to our vision for
‘redefining humanly possible.’”
This partnership between
Jefferson and Israeli medical
professionals has been build-
ing for some time, according
to Grunwald.

In the past, he said, “this
relationship materialized in
many areas — computational
biology, cancer research and
other areas. Jefferson scientists
worked together with Israelis
in order to develop new areas
of research, apply for grants,
receive their grants in dollars,
and eventually ended up pub-
lishing the fruits of the com-
bined research in elite journals
in the life sciences area.”
He stressed that he sees this
work as real-life practice of the
ideas discussed in books like
the famous Start-Up Nation.

The IIA, under the purview of
the Ministry of Economy, is tasked
with fostering scientific research
and development in Israel.

“We are delighted to collabo-
rate with a leading academic and
medical center such as Jefferson,”
said Ami Appelbaum, chairman
of the IIA. “The combination of
Israeli innovation and Jefferson’s
clinical experience, expertise and
facilities will enable the creation
of cutting-edge solutions that
will prove instrumental in laying
the groundwork for the future of
health care and providing supe-
rior personalized medical care.”
Applicants have until March
28 to submit their expression
of interest. Winners will be
announced in December. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



H eadlines
Educator Brings Past to Present with Tours
L O CAL
SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
MICHAEL SCHATZ’S LOVE
for Jewish education has taken
him to working at Gratz
College, serving as president of
the Jewish Educators Assembly
and running Philadelphia
Jewish History Tours.

Schatz, an Elkins Park res-
ident whose family has lived
in the Philadelphia area for
generations, has taken groups
on walking and bus tours of
Philadelphia’s Jewish history
for about three years. The tours
are an offshoot of his work as a
Jewish educator.

“As an educator, to look at
history and living history and
teaching people — not in a
classroom — in a different kind
of a format was an exciting
sideline to what I am typically
doing,” Schatz said.

Schatz works at a few dif-
ferent synagogues, as well as
for a private company called
Hebrew Helpers. This past
year, he was awarded an hon-
orary degree from the Jewish
Theological Seminary.

He mostly does group tours
— with students, senior adults,
sisterhoods and others — but
has also done a tour open to
individuals and a family tour.

He is interested in expanding,
for example by taking National
Museum of American Jewish
History (NMAJH) visitors to
places they have learned about
at the museum.

Schatz leads the groups on
different paths through the
old Jewish Quarter of Society
Hill and Queen Village,
or Wynnefield and West
Philadelphia, or the Northeast
and Elkins Park and more.

Teenagers, Schatz said, like
the walking tour of Society
Hill and Queen Village, while
older adults love to go back to
the neighborhoods where they
or their parents grew up.

The tours can take partici-
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM pants as far back as the 1740s —
when Jewish immigrants began
establishing a community in
Philadelphia — with visits to
the Mikveh Israel Cemetery,
the oldest Jewish cemetery in
Philadelphia. He shows partici-
pants the places where the com-
munity’s synagogues, schools,
kosher eateries and recreation
centers used to be.

Schatz often learns more about
Philadelphia’s Jewish history from
his own tour participants.

Once, when Schatz took
a tour group to Temple Beth
Hillel-Beth El, a man in the
group happened to have been
instrumental in the merger of
the two synagogues and told
Schatz that story in great detail.

Another time, while tour-
ing a church that used to be
a synagogue with a group of
seniors from Golden Slipper
Gems on the Main Line, one
man said that he had been Bar
Mitzvahed there.

Moriah SimonHazani, the
director of Golden Slipper
Gems on the Main Line,
said she took two groups of
older adults on the tours with
Schatz. He previously taught
a course at Golden Slipper,
which SimonHazani said res-
onated with the older adults
who attended. She said Golden
Slipper Gems was interested
in organizing more tours with
Schatz in the future.

“He’s very important to
both preserving the history of
Jewish Philadelphia but also
projecting to the next genera-
tion,” SimonHazani said.

The history of Jewish
Philadelphia begins with immi-
gration from London and
Amsterdam when the city was
still young.

As different migratory
waves of Jews came from dif-
ferent countries throughout
the centuries, they spread out.

When German Jews began
arriving in the 19th century,
they clustered to the north near
Franklin Square, then later into
Michael Schatz in front on Society Hill
Synagogue Northern Liberties. As Russian
Jews settled around South
Street, Marshall Street and
Port Richmond, the German
Jews spread north toward
Elkins Park, Schatz said.

It wasn’t until the ’60s and
’70 that Jews began moving
into the suburbs in substantial
numbers, Schatz said.

Nowadays, as people prior-
itize living closer to work over
living near other Jewish peo-
ple, the population has spread
across Greater Philadelphia.

“Today is really different,”
Schatz said. “The community is
so spread out and so suburban,
and there’s a lot of people moving
back into the city, young people
and empty nesters moving back
into Center City, so there still
is a vibrant Jewish community,
but you can’t say that there’s a
Jewish neighborhood.”
Schatz has always been
interested in history. As a child,
stories from his grandparents
about the neighborhoods they
grew up in fascinated him,
and his Jewish education at
Beth Sholom Congregation
cemented that interest.

JEWISH EXPONENT
Tour group visits Vilna Congregation.

Photos provided
His training ground for
being a Jewish educator was
Camp Ramah, where he spent
every summer from the age of
17 to 25 as a counselor. He also
participated in Gratz College’s
program for high schoolers.

After high school, he
attended Vassar College, where
he studied pre-med for a bit
before changing his major to
Jewish studies. Vassar didn’t
have a Jewish studies program
at the time, so he designed his
own curriculum, taking classes
in religion and history.

“My father’s a doctor,” Schatz
said. “It’s not that they pushed
me into [pre-med], but I guess
that’s what a lot of kids see —
what their parents do — and
they figure that’s what they’re
going to do, until they realize
they can be their own person.”
After college, he worked for
United Synagogue Youth as
a regional director, then got
a master’s in education from
Arcadia University and started
working at Gratz.

“I love being Jewish,” Schatz
said. “I loved the study and the rit-
ual and synagogue and the culture
of the Jewish people and Israel,
and imparting that to young peo-
ple and also to interested learning
adults and my own children and,
beyond that, my students. It is
what I wanted to do.” l
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