Shalvi

Shalvi offered to serve on a temporary and voluntary basis until a replacement could be found.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

Shalvi, who was twice re-elected chairwoman of IWN, retired from the organization in 2000.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

Shalvi was born in Essen, Germany on October 16, 1926, the youngest of the three children of Benzion (1890 – 1955) and Perl (1893 – 1962) Margulies, who were first cousins.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

Prior to the academic year 1973 – 1974, Shalvi was elected head of the Institute of Languages and Literature at the Hebrew University, a position in which she also introduced such innovations as an inter-departmental staff seminar in which faculty members presented and studied a common topic (e.g., the Epic).

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

This in turn led to a meeting of all women faculty members at the Hebrew University, at which Shalvi and two others were chosen to present a series of complaints and demands to the (male) heads of the institution.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

Shalvi was also denied the position of dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences on the grounds that she was a woman.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

During World War II the family lived in Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire, and Shalvi completed her schooling at the Aylesbury Grammar School, from which in 1944 she gained entrance to Newnham College, Cambridge — one of only two colleges of the university at which women could then study.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

This temporary period lasted for fifteen years, during which the student body grew from sixty pupils to a maximal two hundred and forty and Pelech attained the rarely granted status of an officially-recognized experimental school — a status resulting from the innovative curricula and teaching methods introduced by Shalvi, as well as the development of a democratic mode of school management that maximally involved pupils and staff in decision-making.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

It was at Cambridge, in the summer of 1946, that Shalvi first encountered a group of teenage D. P.s (Displaced Persons, as Holocaust survivors were then known) — an encounter that profoundly shocked her and led her, just prior to her last year at Newnham, to decide to study social work in order to have a suitable profession once she arrived in Palestine.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009

Inspired by her vision of what a university in a pioneering region could be, Shalvi became a central figure in various forums at the university, being repeatedly elected by her peers to represent them on committees, in the senate, on the central steering committee and, finally, also on the board of governors.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi. 2009