[1] About a year before the official inauguration of the Hebrew University, a Jewish-American philanthropist, Philip Wattenberg, endowed the new university with $190,000 (equivalent to $3.3 million in 2023) for a research institute in the name of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

[4] The Institute moved to the Philip Wattenburg Building in 1928,[note 1] designed by Benjamin Chaikin and Sir Frank Mears, where it remained until the Hebrew University lost access to Mount Scopus in 1948.

Edmund Landau served as the university's first Professor of Mathematics, and negotiated the transfer of Felix Klein's private library from Göttingen to Jerusalem, which served as the basis for the new mathematical library in Jerusalem.

[5] Other early faculty members included Binyamin Amirà, Abraham Fraenkel, and Michael Fekete.

[6] A number of researchers arrived at the institute during the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, such as Issai Schur and Otto Toeplitz.