COMING HOME TO A HOME WE NEVER LIVED IN
Reflections about a personal journey that started in a secular Jewish home in Canada; encompassed more than half a century in Academia investigating disease outbreaks on this planet and he possibility of life on other planets; included side trips through the "cafeteria of Jewish experience" tasting such delicacies as Zionism, Socialism, Reform, Conservative, Reconstruction, and Modern Orthodoxy; and ultimately found the path to Torah and the Bait Midrash of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Click here for the latest article that appeared in The Jerusalem Post about Professor Greene
Click here to RSVP for the Lecture!
VELVL GREENE PHD MPH
A Short Biography
Prior to his recent retirement, Velvl Greene was the Carlin Professor of Public Health and Epidemiology at the Ben Gurion University Medical School in Israel and the Director of its prestigious Lord Jakobovits Center for Jewish Medical Ethics. But these were only the last positions he filled after a distinguished American academic career that started 57 years ago at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, his birthplace. In addition to university teaching jobs in Saskatchewan, Louisiana, and North Carolina, he spent nearly 40 years studying, teaching, doing research, and "climbing the academic ladder" - from graduate assistant to full Professor - at the University of Minnesota, where he held joint appointments in the School of Public Health and Medical School. During his Minnesota years he taught graduate courses in his specialties - Environmental Microbiology, Sterilization & Disinfection, and Nosocomial Infection Epidemiology - and also taught Personal and Community Health to more than 32,000 undergraduate students (as well as thousands of others who tuned into his 6:00 AM courses on educational TV). He proudly points out that by the time he made Aliyah in 1986, Minnesota was probably the healthiest state in the Union!
A burning, agnostic, liberal in his youth (who moved to Louisiana in 1956 to teach in one of the first racially integrated colleges in the Deep South) he gradually drifted back to the North, tasted many dishes in the "Cafeteria of Jewish Experience" (Zionism, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Modern Orthodox), and finally settled down in the paradox known as Habad Hasidism. His presentations on "Science and Torah", "Search for Jewish Life on Mars", and "Ancient Answers to Very Modern Medical Dilemmas" have made him as well known to Jewish audiences on six continents as he is to his professional colleagues in Public Health and Microbiology.
Professor Greene was one of the pioneers of NASA's Exobiology research program in the 1960s and was honored in 1983 by being simultaneously named a Fulbright Scholar and awarded a Busch Fellowship for excellence in Undergraduate Education. A prolific researcher - more than 100 publications on such diverse topics as "The Microbiology of the Stratosphere", "Personal Hygiene and the 19th century Health Revolution", and "The Ethics of Re-using disposable Medical Devices in Hospitals" - he and his wife, Gail, now live in Beersheva, where she sings and teaches singing while he tries to keep track of their five children, two dozen + grandchildren, and their first great-grandchild