Heinz Steinitz (; April 26, 1909 – April 28, 1971) was a senior Israeli marine biologist and herpetologist, Professor and Chairman of the Department of zoology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He laid the foundation for research and teaching in marine biology and oceanography in Israel. In 1968 he founded the Marine Biology Laboratory of the Hebrew University near Eilat, serving as its first director. He also served as a founding member of the Zoological Society of Israel and a co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.
Biography Heinz Steinitz was born in Breslau, German Empire (now Wrocław, Poland) on April 26, 1909, to Walter Steinitz (1882–1963), a cardiologist and zoologist, and Marta Schindler Steinitz (1885–1926).Steinitz, R. (2016) Eine deutsche jüdische Familie wird zerstreut. Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt. pp. 91–107. He grew up in Breslau and was greatly inspired by his father to study science and to be an active Zionist. He studied medicine from 1927 to 1933 in the universities of Breslau, Freiburg and Berlin.Steinitz, H. Curriculum Vitae. Heinz Steinitz archive, The National Library of Israel. Although he passed the Medical Board examination in 1933, and would have started work in a hospital in Berlin and in the Jewish hospital in Breslau, he was prohibited from practicing by the Nazi regime which came to power that same year.Boschwitz, D. (1969) Professor Heinz Steinitz on his sixtieth birthday. Israel Journal of Zoology 18: 127–130. Together with his wife Ruth Aber Steinitz (1907–1995), a medical student as well, he left Germany in 1933 and immigrated to Palestine.
Three sons were born to Heinz Steinitz and Dr. Ruth Steinitz. Each turned to sciences: Raphael Steinitz, an astrophysicist, was a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheba; Gideon Steinitz, a senior geologist, was the former Head of the Geological Survey of Israel, Jerusalem; and Benjamin Steinitz, a plant scientist retired as a senior research scientist in the fields of plant physiology and horticulture at the Institute of Plant Sciences, Agricultural Research Organization, The Volcani Center, Rishon LeZion.
Heinz Steinitz died suddenly from a stroke on April 28, 1971, while being fully active in all positions he held at that time.
Academic career
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). That work marked the moment he changed his path from medicine to zoology. His research on the control of citrus pests, under the supervision of Prof. F. S. Bodenheimer,Harpaz, I. (1984). Frederick Simon Bodenheimer (1897-1959): idealist, scholar, scientist. Annual Review of Entomology 29: 1-24. eventually became the experimental basis for his doctoral thesis. In 1938, Steinitz was the first to obtain a Ph.D. degree in zoology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he took his place in the founders and pioneers of zoology in Israel.
He became a member of the teaching and research staff of the Department of Zoology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1936, advanced along the academic track up to the highest degree of full professor, and worked in the department until his death.Por, F. D. (1973) Heinz Steinitz in memoriam. Marine Biology 19: 271-272 doi:10.1007/BF00348892. The Hebrew University, the first university in Israel, was established only a decade before Steinitz's arrival in Jerusalem; thus, his academic career parallels the early history of zoology research and teaching in the Israeli academia.
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.
Appointed lecturer in 1946, he instructed animal histology, anatomy of livestock animals and laboratory animals. During the Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949) he served in a preventive healthcare military unit, teaching medical students recruited to army service. 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. The university relocated its faculties to west Jerusalem. The zoology department, excluded from the new Givat Ram campus constructed in the 1950s, resided in buildings on different sites in the western city. 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. His office and labs migrated over the years. At first they were in the Terra Sancta building in Rehavia, then in the St. Antonio Monastery building, across from the official residence of the President of Israel, and finally close to the Russian Compound in the center of west Jerusalem. In 1951 Steinitz went to the US for two years as a research fellow at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, where he conducted research in the field of experimental embryology. By 1954 he was promoted to Assistant Professor, became Associate Professor in 1957, and was appointed in 1963 Chairman of Division A of the Department of Zoology in Jerusalem. He lectured in general zoology, vertebrates and invertebrates morphology, animal histology, experimental embryology and ecology. From the mid-1950s onwards, marine biology and marine ecology became core of his research interests. He was the first to teach marine biology, and by 1966 he headed the development of the marine biology curriculum and research programs. In 1968, being Chairman of the Department of Zoology, he was appointed Full Professor.
Steinitz supervised masters and doctoral students, some of whom became senior scientists in fields of biology and environmental sciences in universities, research institutes, colleges and teacher colleges around the country. He believed in the importance of teaching and education at all levels, including preparing students to be school teachers. In this context, in the years 1957-1960 he was board member of the School of Education of the Hebrew University.
Research on fish, amphibians and the ecology of lakes and seas
Heinz Steinitz was an ichthyologist, herpetologist, and marine biologist. He researched the ecology, distribution and evolution of amphibians and fresh water fish in the Middle East; the ecology, distribution and taxonomy of fish in the Red Sea; the ecology of the southeast Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.Aron, W. and Por, F.D., 1972. A tribute to Heinz Steinitz (1909–1971) and Gunnar Thorson (1906–1971). Israel Journal of Zoology 21: 129-130. Other research interests included experimental embryology, neurohistology, and anatomical microscopy of the amphibian eye.Stone, L.S., Steinitz, H. (1957) Regeneration of neural retina and lens from retina pigment cell grafts in adult newts. Journal of Experimental Zoology 135: 301-317. Geographically, his studies were conducted along the Syrian-African Great Rift valley, from Lake Hula and Lake Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee) in the north of Israel, through the Dead Sea in the center of the country, down to the Gulf of Eilat and the Red Sea in the south. Other parts of his work were carried out in the south east Mediterranean Basin and along the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula. His research concerned taxonomy, anatomy, zoogeographic distribution and ecology of the fauna investigated.
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.The papers of Heinrich Mendelssohn. Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center. In 1940, the two researchers discovered the rare Hula painted frog (Latonia nigriventer), the only living member of the genus Latonia, an amphibian endemic to the Hula marshes.Mendelssohn, H., Steinitz, H. (1943). A new frog from Palestine. Copeia 4: 231-233. Lake Hula and its marshland were drained in the 1950s. The frog, considered to be extinct for about half a century due to the destruction of its habitat, was rediscovered in 2011. It is considered a living fossil, and it is included in the list of endangered species.Hula painted frog, Latonia nigriventer, The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Steinitz also explored fish species living in the unique ecological niche of Ein Feshkha.Steinitz, H. (1951). The fishes of Ein Feshkha, Palestine. Nature 167: 531-532.Steinitz, H. (1951) On the distribution and evolution of the Cyprinodont fishes of the Mediterranean region and the Near East. Bonner Zoolgische Beiträge 2:113-124. 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. Fish in this special habitat evolved isolated from fish populating other habitats.
On a first study of the southeast Mediterranean Basin, published in 1947 jointly with Prof. Georg Haas, they observed fish of Indo-Pacific origin.Haas, G., Steinitz, H. (1947). Erythrean fishes on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. Nature 160: 28. Later, Steinitz published dozens of papers on fish, the fauna and the ecology of the southeast Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. In 1967, together with Dr. William Aron from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Steinitz launched a joint program on the role of the Suez Canal as a waterway for the passage of marine species between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
After Steinitz's death in 1971, the survey and monitoring of the invasion of biota from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea (and to a smaller extent biota migration in the opposite direction) proliferated, and it continues into the 21st century.Por, F. D. (1978) Lessepsian Migration – the influx of Red Sea biota into the Mediterranean by way of the Suez Canal. Ecological Studies 23, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, 228 pp. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-66728-2.Galil, B. S. (2009) Taking stock: inventory of alien species in the Mediterranean Sea. Biological Invasions 11: 359-372.Zakaria, H. Y. (2015). Lessepsian migration of zooplankton through Suez Canal and its impact on ecological system. The Egyptian Journal of Aquatic Research 41: 129-144. The phenomenon of the continuous flow of marine biota across the Suez Canal is termed Lessepsian migration. To this day, hundreds species native to the Red Sea have been identified in the Mediterranean Sea, and probably others are yet unidentified. This human-mediated invasion has significantly impacted the Mediterranean ecosystem and endangered many local and endemic Mediterranean species.Galil, B. S. and Goren, M. (2014) Metamorphoses: bioinvasions in the Mediterranean Sea. In: The Mediterranean Sea, its history and present challenges (pp. 463-478). Springer Netherlands. Goffredo, S., Dubinsky, Z. (Eds.) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6704-1_27 ISBN.