Bosmat is the first technical high school in the Land of Israel, established by the Technion. In 1928, engineer Yaakov Ehrlich founded BESLAM (the School for Crafts), which was part of the Technion and located on its grounds next to the workshops. In 1933, at the initiative of the Technion, Dr. Shlomo Brardin proposed the creation of a four-year vocational high school. From 1933 to 1937, both institutions, BESLAM and the vocational high school, operated simultaneously in the same courtyard and adjacent to each other. In 1937, the School for Crafts was integrated into the vocational high school and has since been known as “Bosmat.” Notable alumni of Bosmat include the late Yuli Ofer, the late Eitan Wertheimer, Giora Inbar, and many others.
The “Bosmat” vocational secondary school for the certification of practical engineers and technicians is a high school for scientific and technological education established by the Technion in Haifa in 1928. It was the first scientific-technological school in the Land of Israel. The school included laboratories, a library and sports facilities. The school was closed in 2007 and reopened in 2013. The name of the school was changed to the “New Bosmat” and it was defined as a regional science and technology school.
Further history – In 1928, the engineer Jakob Ehrlich, who before immigrating to Israel was a teacher of metal trades in vocational schools established by Baron Hirsch in Russia, founded “Baslam” the Beit Sefer l’Melacha (craft school), which was part of the Technion and located in the yard near the workshops. Students studied at the craft school for two years and focused on practical studies of the wood and metal trades. In 1933, at the initiative of the Technion, Dr. Shlomo Bardin initiated the establishment of a four-year vocational high school. It offered three study tracks: a four-year track, a two-year track and a three-year track. Students in the two-year track worked in the workshops 40 hours a week and had 8-9 hours a week of theoretical studies. Students in the four-year track studied 25 hours and worked 20 hours in the workshops a week.
Negotiations took place between the Technion and Dr. Arthur Biram, the director of the nearby Reali School, on the establishment of a school for artisans (meisters) to be called the artisan school or the national vocational school. The negotiations hit an obstacle after Dr. Biram refused to establish joint administration with the Technion and Dr. Bardin demanded that the proposed vocational school be an integral part of the Reali School. Shlomo Kaplansky, director of the Technion, opposed this demand. Kaplansky went to Prague, as a delegate on behalf of Poalei Zion to the International Socialist Congress. There he learned that Dr. Biram was going to create facts on the ground in connection with the establishment of the school. Therefore, he summoned Dr. Bardin, who was in London, to Prague.
On August 24, 1933, a memorandum of understanding was signed concerning the establishment of a vocational high school independent of the Reali School. The Executive Committee approved the memorandum of understanding, and thus Bosmat, the Vocational High School near the Technion, was founded. Between 1933 and 1937, the two institutions, “Baslam” and the vocational secondary school, operated at the same time, in the same courtyard, and next door to each other. In 1937, Baslam was integrated into Bosmat and ceased to exist independently. The school’s first building was erected in Hadar Hacarmel near the water tower and a well at the corner of Balfour and Masada Streets that was used in those days by the residents of the neighborhood. The school was located in the backyard of the old Technion building designed by Alexander Brewald.
With the aim of training skilled workers for the Hebrew industry and preparing the students for higher studies at the Technion, some of the first professional courses of study in Israel were established at Bosmat. These included majors in machinery, electricity, architecture, chemical engineering, carpentry, refrigeration and air conditioning, automobile mechanics, radio (which became the electronics major) and other majors that were added and changed over the years according to requirements, for example, instrumentation and control, telecommunications, and automatic data processing (later automatic data processing systems).
In 1938, an attempt was made to develop a course in maritime studies that ended up being transferred from Bosmat in Haifa to Acre. During the British Mandate, the Technion building in Hadar, and the buildings of the vocational school, were the center of the Haganah in Haifa and the entire region. In the workshops, underground, hand grenades and barrels for Sten machine guns were produced, as were signaling devices (Morse) and heliographs, and during the War of Independence, sights for cannons were brought to Israel without them. Even before that, during the Second World War, the school produced spare airplane parts for the British Air Force because they could not be flown in from England. During the War of Independence, the students participated in the production of weapons and volunteered to join the ranks of the fighters.
In May 1957, a building named for the donor Alexander Konoff was erected in Technion City. This was meant to be only the first building in Kiryat Bosmat in Technion City, but following Konoff’s death, the donations from his family stopped and no more donors were found, so the Konoff building was the only one in Kiryat Bosmat. The majors offered included automatic data processing systems, electronics, electricity, instrumentation and control, lighting, and air conditioning. The air conditioning department had a workshop that provided maintenance services to the Technion and the medical school.
Until 1958, only boys attended the school. Even in the school’s final years, the number of girls in the school did not exceed 25%. All majors were open to girls, but there were majors such as auto mechanics which no girls selected; they concentrated in majors such as chemistry and construction. During the 1980s and onwards, majors began to be closed due to lack of demand from students. During the last decades of the 20th century, only one new major was offered (industry and management). The peak years were at the end of the 1960s when the number of students reached 1,600, of whom 160 were female students. A plan to expand the school complex was implemented, designed by the architect Shlomo Gilad. He planned the expansion of the old classroom building, the Beit Aharoni workshop building (named for Dr. Gershon Aharoni, who was the director of the institution), as well as the Hadarion Building, named for the Hadar Hacarmel neighborhood. The Hadarion is an octagonal building with a library, an auditorium and several other halls. On its ground floor there is a plaza with a memorial wall honoring graduates of the school who fell in Israel’s wars. Bosmat reached its peak in the early 1980s when about 2,000 students studied there, of whom 480 were female students. The school also operated as a college for training technicians and practical engineers. Some of them were the graduates of the school who continued directly to study in grades 13-14 for an additional year or two, and some were students who trained as technicians and practical engineers following their military service, in cooperation with the Ministry of Labor.
The Technion was the sole owner of Bosmat and was responsible for its budget, including the actuarial obligations for the pension of the institution’s retirees. The budgets received from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labor, and the income from tuition fees, did not even cover current expenses, which were relatively high as a vocational school with expensive equipment, laboratories and workshops, and a low student-to-teacher ratio. In the late 1990s, the school’s cumulative deficit grew every year. And at the end of 1998, the obligations for pensions totaled NIS 96.8 million, a current deficit of NIS 15.3 million, and in total the deficit reached about NIS 112 million.
In addition, due to the demographic change in the city of Haifa in particular, as well as a decrease in the orientation of the youth to vocational secondary education in general, there was a decrease in the number of students enrolled in the school. After several years of trying to find other authorities or institutions, such as the Haifa Municipality and the Ort network, that would take ownership of the school from the Technion and attempts to transfer the budgetary responsibility of the school to the state budget, the Technion announced in 2004 that the school would no longer accept new students, and that it expected to close in 2007 after the last cohort of students completed their studies. In the summer of 2007, at the end of the school year, the school’s administration was busy dismantling the laboratories, selling or handing over equipment, processing graduate requests for certificate approvals, and arranging books and files. During the years 2007-2008, the entire school archive was transferred to the municipal archive in Haifa. After its closure and reopening in 2007, the school’s workshop building became part of the Israel National Museum of Science in Haifa.
In another building that had been used by Bosmat’s middle school, starting from the 2007 school year, the six-year “Mofat Bosmat” school, managed by the Mofat association, was opened. Two classroom buildings were abandoned and one of them burned. A center combining academia and community was opened in the “Hadiron” building, but the sports hall, which became a dangerous building following a fire, was destroyed in September 2020 while it was being used by the Home Front Command for a training exercise on rescuing casualties from rubble.
In 2013, the owner of the school, the municipality of Haifa, decided to renew the face of the school and return it to its grandeur. The upper division, which had been closed for several years, was reopened. In 2016, Avi Ziegler was appointed director of the school, and in January 2018, under his management, the school moved to its new temporary residence in the Technological District in the Neve David neighborhood in Haifa. In the compound of the abandoned ‘Shuv’ school next to the Technological District, it is expected that Bosmat’s new study tower will be built. The name of the school was changed to “New Basmat” and it has been defined as a regional science and technology school. The hyphens have been removed from its name. In the 2018 academic year, over 500 students were studying technological and scientific majors at the school. In 2018, the school received a special reward grant from the Ministry of Education for the students’ achievements in the matriculation exams, and it joined the Yahlom program, the digital learning track in state history.