Itongadol.- In an atmosphere of great cordiality, the Association of Argentine Friends of Ben Gurion University of the Negev (AAAUBG) held its New Year’s Eve toast last Tuesday, celebrating «creativity and tikkun olam».
The event was held at the Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery and was attended by Orly Benzacar, director of the Gallery, who expressed her pleasure to welcome the guests and to accompany Nava Rubenzadeh, president of the Association.
Orly emphasised the coincidence of the title of the meeting, «Creativity and Tikkun Olam», with the retrospective exhibition of the great painter Romulo Maccio, whose creativity continues to be admired in all latitudes.
At the meeting, the coordinator of the Academic Committee of the AAAUBG, Emilio Perina, said: «In these 16 years we have been working together with a very important group of people. When I met Nava in 2006, she offered me to work with her, and we said we wanted to do something different from what the other universities were doing, which are doing fabulous work, but it didn’t make sense for us to repeat the same activities».
«What we tried to do was always strive to see what topics we could touch on that had not been touched on before and that had a strong connection with the local reality. We have held an average of six or seven meetings a year, and Santiago Kovadloff, Marcos Aguinis, Willy Kohan, Jorge Ossona, Fernando Iglesias, Patricia Bullrich, Miguel Wiñazky, Rogelio Frigerio, Marta Nercellas, Nelson Castro, Carlos Fara, Mariano Caucino, Daniel Sabsay, among many others, have given talks», he added.
«We are working together with new colleagues who have joined us, whose diversity of profiles allows us to broaden our vision for next year, when Israel will celebrate 75 years of its existence, and to see the possibility of increasing the exchange of knowledge, linking UBG’s relationship with study and research spaces with greater intensity», he emphasised.
He was followed by Gustavo Rabinowicz, a collaborator at the AAAUBG, who recently had the opportunity to travel to Israel and get to know this university.
«In June of this year, through Daniel Berliner, I met Nava and I was honestly amazed by her. I didn’t know why I was going to that meeting, I sat down in front of her and she told me about her enthusiasm for Ben Gurion University of the Negev, an institution I didn’t know about. A few months later, for work reasons I decided to travel to Europe and I said ‘I’m so close to Israel, I’m going to get away and visit the famous university that Nava is so proud of’. And there’s a reason why,» Rabinowicz said.
«I arrived at the university and found it to be an absolutely incredible place. First of all from a building point of view, you come to a place where you say ‘what is this in the middle of the Negev’ if you think that 50 years ago this was nothingness itself. And now you arrive and this University is a whole city, gigantic, with 50 impressive buildings», he said.
He also highlighted the importance of the Opening Doors programme, through which Ben Gurion University students are obliged to give their time for a year to offer a service to underprivileged families in the south of the country.
Finally, the event closed with the words of Nava Rubenzadeh, who said: «I am happy to be able to put together a new group of younger people who can take my place, because I have already given everything. And I think that young people have to take our place. This is continuity.
The toast was well attended by academics and community leaders.