Career
After earning a master’s degree in botany and Judaic studies, he developed a field survival course for training the Hagana and Palmach, Israel’s pre-state military organizations. After 1948, he taught the same program to the Israel Defense Forces. Noga Hareuveni"s parents, Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni, were botanists who emigrated from Russia to British Palestine in 1912.
On the Mount Scopus campus of Jerusalem"s Hebrew University, they maintained the Museum of Biblical and Talmudic Botany, until it was destroyed in the 1948 war.
On 253 hectares, the staff of the botanical reserve now cultivates tens of thousands of trees and other plants. Great cedars are the most impressive of the trees.
"These great trees of course are not native to Israel," Doctor Hareuveni says, "but they"re referred to many times in the Bible, usually as a symbol of haughtiness, or again when Solomon had cedar timbers shipped from Lebanon for the construction of the Temple. I was the one who shinnied up a cedar and collected the cones.
Jerusalem is less than 3,000 feet above sea level, and most experts said that was too low for cedars to grow.
. But not only did the cedars grow," Nogah Hareuveni continues, "they somehow even survived the neglect of 19 years while Mount Scopus was a no man"s land in divided Jerusalem.
