Heinz Steinitz
Unable to get in 1933 a permit from the British administration in Palestine to practice as a physician, Heinz Steinitz turned to earn his living in an agricultural research station located in Rehovot (and later in Petah Tikva).
In the first decade of his career, including the years of World War II, he acted in the department as a teaching and research assistant, and concurrently, during 1943–1946, he lectured zoology at the Kibbutzim College of Education.
During the Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949) he served in a preventive healthcare military unit, teaching medical students recruited to army service.
[2][3] As a consequence of that war, the campus of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus became an enclave in the Jordanian kingdom, disconnected from the western part of a divided Jerusalem.
Steinitz was active in reorganizing the department's function under the new circumstances and took care of the zoological collections moved from Mount Scopus to west Jerusalem.
Together with his colleague Dr. Heinrich Mendelssohn, then at the Biological-Pedagogical Institute and later Professor at the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, he explored the fauna of Lake Hula and its surrounding swamps.
[11][12] This site — the deepest continental point on Earth — is a saline wetland in the desert, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, nourished by a spring of brackish water.
He published nearly sixty papers in his different research fields, including on the discovery of fish new to science like the Kinneret-Sardine Acanthobrama terraesanctae, Garra Barreimiae (together with Henry Weed Fowler), and Tristramella sacra intermedia (together with A. Ben-Tuvia).
It was an interdisciplinary marine sciences research effort to survey the south Red Sea and to collect biological specimens and data from the region.
Otto Haim Oren from the Haifa Sea Fishery Research Station and Lev Fishelson from the Tel Aviv University, both at that time doctoral students of Steinitz, assisted in organizing the project.
The taxonomic and zoogeographic identification of specimens was often conducted by correspondence between Steinitz and ichthyologists and curators of research institutes and science museums around the world.
[18][19] The formative years of Steinitz's career took place under the difficult conditions prevailing in any budding university, compounded with the instability of the wars which accompanied the resurrection of the state of Israel.
Steinitz pursued connections and collaborations with the international community of scientists in order to ensure that research in Israel met the highest standards—a goal of critical importance for himself, the university, and the country.
Furthermore, he realized that connections with colleagues from foreign countries would diminish the limits and disadvantages inherent in working in a small local scientific community geographically removed from global science centers.
The wide and branched connections he wove over many years with scientists worldwide helped him to form a sound basis for what was, at that time, the early days of marine biology, oceanography, and ichthyology in Israel.
He became acquainted with Dr. Günther Böhnecke, an oceanographer who played a central role after World War II in rehabilitating Germany's scientific relationships with countries worldwide.
The personal acquaintance and mutual appreciation between Steinitz and Böhnecke led to the support by the DFG for building and operating a marine biology laboratory near Eilat.
[22] The findings were indicative for intrusion of alien fishes into the eastern Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal that was constructed and opened only several decades prior to those first observations.
Furthermore, a marine station in the Gulf of Eilat would facilitate analysis of the environmental and ecological changes resulting from man-made connection between the two global water bodies.
Since the Gulf of Eilat is in the geographical periphery of Israel and remote from any academic center, and considering that the Israeli nucleus of marine biologists was at that time still very small, Steinitz developed relationships with colleagues abroad and convinced them to come and conduct some of their research in the planned station.
He also reinforced the local station's research and management staff with an international scientific advisory board of oceanographers from Europe, Australia and the US in order to strengthen and sustain the nascent activity.
The vision of Walter Steinitz was ultimately realized in 1968, five years after he died, when the Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) of The Hebrew University near Eilat was inaugurated.
[25] Launching the laboratory was a peak in the career of Heinz Steinitz as an Israeli zoologist and as an internationally recognized senior marine biologist.
Israel's Council for Higher Education decided in 1985 that the station would become an interuniversity institute, with the marine biology laboratory being an integral part of it.
Steinitz was appointed to a number of governmental forums and assigned to national tasks by different Ministries: Lake Kinneret is the largest aboveground freshwater reservoir in Israel.
Ensuing research of the physical, chemical, biological and environmental components of the lake's ecosystem continuously supports intelligent management of this important national freshwater resource.
