The German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF) celebrated its 40th anniversary at Schloss Elmau.
“It is not easy for Israeli researchers to find German partners,” says Gur Alroey, president of Israel’s third-largest university in Haifa. He is sitting in a circle with other leading figures at Schloss Elmau, reflecting on how to boost the profile of the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development – GIF for short – in Germany and make its funding opportunities even more attractive to young academics.
The historian, who is researching Jewish migration from German ports to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, is one of 40 Israeli and German GIF alumni who have travelled to Elmau in Bavaria to mark the 40th anniversary of the research foundation, which is funded in equal parts by the German and Israeli governments.
GIF was founded on 4 July 1986. Its initiators were the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Since then, GIF has been funding joint projects between German and Israeli researchers for a period of three years, with up to 200,000 euros per year. To date, more than 2,000 research proposals have been supported under the regular programme. The GIF is popular in Israel: for many of its alumni, the ‘GIF grant’ paved the way for their research careers.
For Sigal Abramovich, the newly elected Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, too, the first grant she received from GIF in 2006 marked the start of her current specialism at the interface between micropalaeontology, geochemistry and environmental sciences. Together with her long-standing German research partner, Michal Kucera, Professor of Micropalaeontology and Palaeo-oceanography at MARUM – Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, she studies marine single-celled protists, which are extremely sensitive indicators of environmental conditions and climate change in the oceans.
Friendships blossomed through their joint research
Through their joint research, the Israeli and the German quickly became friends. “The friendship between our families is the greatest gift to have come out of the GIF funding,” says the marine scientist. Shulamit Michaeli, who also researches and teaches at Bar-Ilan University – who has just been awarded the country’s highest cultural honour, the Israel Prize, for her pioneering work on parasites – also emphasises the special friendship that binds her to her German research partner, the biochemist Albrecht Bindereif from the University of Giessen. The families visited one another; her father, who had managed to flee Germany in 1939 as part of the Youth Aliyah, even spoke German with Bindereif.
“The support from GIF changed my life,” says Shulamit Michaeli. She visited Giessen and Würzburg and held seminars there; German students frequently work in her laboratories. The demand is hardly surprising, as Shulamit Michaeli’s studies have influenced research into genetic information transfer far beyond the field of parasitology and contributed to broader insights in molecular biology. She is currently developing a nanomedicine for leishmaniasis – a dangerous parasite that also occurs in Germany – consisting of tiny carriers that deliver active ingredients directly to the cells and kill them – and hopes to begin clinical trials soon.
“One plus one equals more than two”
There are good reasons why Israeli researchers enjoy collaborating with German partners, not least because of their shared international profile: Daniel Zajfman, a physicist and, from 2006 to 2019, the youngest president of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, has devoted half his scientific career to German-Israeli research collaboration. In Germany, he was awarded the prestigious Harnack Medal by the Max Planck Society in 2023 in recognition of this work.
“Germans and Israelis conduct research in very different ways,” he says. But when they join forces, “one plus one equals more than two”. This excellence is evident in the average impact of their joint publications, which is significantly higher than that of their respective individual publications.
German alumni also have good reasons for collaborating on research with Israel. “Where we often see problems at first, my Israeli research colleagues see solutions,” says Tanja Klenk from the Helmut Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg. There is simply a different mindset.
In 2018, the political scientist received a grant from GIF together with Nissim Cohen, a political and administrative scientist from the University of Haifa. In their comparative research, the two academics investigated whether or not the welfare state was reinventing itself in the course of its liberalisation. Tanja Klenk particularly appreciates the fact that the collaboration has greatly expanded her network in Israel and that she now works with colleagues from other social science faculties, for example at the Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan University and Sapir College in the north-western Negev Desert.
“If people reacted like mice, we would soon have a treatment for previously incurable neurodegenerative diseases,” says Christian Griesinger, a biochemist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Natural Sciences in Göttingen. He has received funding from GIF on two occasions, most recently in 2020.
“German companies shied away from the risk”
Griesinger is particularly driven by the results of this research project with chemist Shai Rahimipour from Bar-Ilan University, which focused on the protein clumps that lead to Alzheimer’s and a new method for detecting them in the brains of mice and, ultimately, in humans as well. For the current development of the therapeutics, the biotech firm in Petach Tikva – co-founded by the Leibniz Prize winner – found what it was looking for. The Israeli multinational pharmaceutical company Teva was willing to take the risk of funding the clinical trials. “German companies shied away from the risk,” Griesinger laments.
Reflecting on the past 40 years of GIF, Michael Brenner, International President of the Leo Baeck Institute – the leading research institute for the heritage of German-speaking Jewry – and Director of the “Centre for Israel Studies” at American University in Washington D.C., summarises the significance of the German-Israeli Research Foundation in Elmau: “The GIF has contributed more to promoting German-Israeli understanding than any other academic organisation.” However, he expressed the hope – particularly for the next generation of scholarship holders – that conditions on the ground, especially in Israel, would once again allow for a more vibrant exchange.
Source: Jüdische Allgemeine (in German)|Author: Gabriele Hermani