Ariela Gordon-Shaag, a Chicago native, began her career at Hadassah Academic College in the heart of Jerusalem in 2007 when she established the school’s master’s program in optometry. Now, as she takes over as president of the newly rebranded Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, she has a clear-eyed vision of the school, its future growth and how it is woven into the fabric of a diverse city.

“Jerusalem is in our DNA. We’re part of the ecosystem of the city of Jerusalem,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy, leading this reporter on a tour of the downtown campus on the corner of Harav Kook and Rehov Hanevi’im streets.

The name change, with its emphasis on “Jerusalem,” signifies a strategic shift for the institution.

After many years of collaboration with Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which helped establish the college in 1970 — first as a technological vocational school and then in 1996 as an academic college — both entities decided to pursue their own distinct missions last year, she said. 

“The College is embarking on a new path and will continue to educate generations of students while the Hadassah Women’s Organization, owners of Hadassah Medical Organization, will continue its work of more than a century for the welfare of the Israeli public, especially in the fields of health, education and empowering and advocating for women,” Hadassah said in a statement, stressing the “mutual respect” that the two organizations have for one another.

The college’s new name reflects the institution’s commitment to its identity as a multidisciplinary institution, emphasizing its role as the largest public college in Jerusalem and its integration within the city’s ecosystem, according to Gordon-Shaag.

Consisting of two locations the campus includes the ultra-sleek $18 million Helmsley Charitable Trust Interdisciplinary Science Center, which opened in 2019 and houses the Azrieli Exhibition Gallery on one corner and on the opposite corner one of the historic buildings still remaining on the street: the former Rothschild Hospital named for Zionist philanthropist Meyer Rothschild.

The college also encompasses the famed House of Arches, where part of the intense love story played out between Sephardic beauty Leah Abushdid and impoverished Ashkenazi journalist Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Hebrew reviver Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The buildings attract tour groups looking for historic nostalgia as they walk down Hanevi’im Street. Today it is officially the college’s Esther Gottesman Center for Technology and housed under the sweeping arched ceiling is the college’s library, communication disorders department including the audiology and speech pathology clinics, the Adler Aphasia Center and classrooms.  

Another separate campus located on Strauss Street near the Haredi neighborhood of Meah Shearim offers seven undergraduate degrees for Haredi students, in which they attend for gender-separated lectures, but complete their labs and clinics in the downtown campus where there is no gender separation. Gordon-Shaag noted that the college has been asked to offer social work degrees for Haredi students in light of the growing need of practitioners who have cultural competency within the community.

Some 54% of the students are the first generation in their family to go into higher education, said Gordon-Shaag, so the outcome measure that most interests the college is employability. “Our mission is to make higher education accessible to people who wouldn’t necessarily be getting an academic education,” she said. “We believe that part of academia should be training the students already from their second year to be managing their careers. So from their second year, we give them workshops about how to write a CV, how to sit for an interview.”

Many of the students remain in Jerusalem after graduation and become part of the city’s workforce, added Gordon-Shaag, who succeeded Bertold Fridlender as president last June when he completed his 12-year term as president.

The Career Counseling Center’s recent survey of over 1,000 graduates from 2019-2021 showed that 90% of graduates are employed or studying for advanced degrees and 84% are currently working in their field of study, with the highest percentage in computer science (96%), economics and accounting (95%) and communication disorders (91%).

According to the 2024 President’s Report, the student body more than doubled in the past decade to almost 5,000 students, with the numbers almost equally divided between local Jerusalem residents and students from outside the city — thus also bringing young people into the city, Gordon-Shaag noted. An overwhelming majority — 74% — are women and almost one-third are Arab, including East Jerusalemites who identify as Palestinians.

“Israel has a very diverse population and we’re very proud of the fact that our student body reflects the diversity of the population in Israel,” Gordon-Shaag said. “I would say as diverse as Israel is, Jerusalem is even more diverse.”

Following the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the college has worked hard to maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect among students, she said. Six members of the college’s family have been killed since Oct. 7, including Hayim Katsman, a lecturer in the department of politics and communication who was murdered by Hamas terrorists at his home in Kibbutz Holit.

“Since Oct. 7, it’s been very challenging — as you can imagine,” she said. “You have students who have just come back from reserve duty who hear Arabic and it’s a trigger for them, and [at the same time] you have students from East Jerusalem who are speaking Arabic and they see reservist students walking with guns and they don’t understand why [they have] guns. We worked hard before the war and we’ve been working very hard since the war to maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect.”

Together with its new identity, the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College is launching major initiatives to expand its impact, she said. It plans to establish a faculty for rehabilitative health care to address Israel’s urgent and growing need for medical professionals — a particular priority since the Oct. 7 attacks, according to Gordon-Shaag. It is currently working towards opening a physical therapy program in collaboration with Hadassah Hospital with an anticipated start date for the 2026-2027 academic year.

The new Center for Multidisciplinary Rehabilitative Healthcare, as the center would be called, will cost an estimated $30 million, and while the Jerusalem municipality will be able to help with an in-kind donation in the form of unused municipal property for the location of the center — as it did with the donation of land for the Helmsley Building — the college will be looking to its donors to help finance the project, she said.

“We believe that having all these different departments, these multidisciplinary departments, under one roof is something that’s going to lead to better training of practitioners and better care of patients because a person doesn’t come in typically for rehabilitation with just one problem,” she said.

There are also plans to change the behavioral science department into a department of psychology and Jerusalem hospitals have approached them to open up master’s programs in psychology and social work in community trauma, Gordon-Shaag said, but that is farther down the pipeline.

The college currently receives approximately $2.5 million per year from donors. It also benefits from government subsidies, which help to cover the costs of education, but the overwhelming majority of the college’s $50 million budget comes from student tuition fees, she said. As the college moves forward with its revamping, it also is aiming to increase enrollment by 40% by 2030, reaching 7,000 students, which will also require more space — a major problem facing the college. 

“We have outgrown this campus, and we’re looking for solutions outside the campus. We’re working very well with the municipality of Jerusalem, [which] supports us. It is important for them that we have the college here in downtown Jerusalem,” said Gordon-Shaag. “We’re definitely staying here.”