Velvl Green: He Came to SLI When Few Would

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"I took a degree in agriculture because I intended to go to Israel to work the land," he says.

When he finished his studies, Greene was obliged to serve in the Canadian Army, which had given him a scholarship. But after less than a year in an officer's training program he left the army to pursue advanced degrees in food science at the University of Minnesota. That's also where he met Gail, his wife-to-be.

The couple remained in Minnesota until 1956, when Greene began teaching bacteriology at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, La., the first American integrated college. When the Supreme Court, in its famous Brown v. Board of Education decision, ordered integration of public schools and universities, half of the school's faculty chose to resign rather than teach black students.

"It was a very critical time," says Greene. "Like a lot of Jews, I was at the forefront of the civil rights movement. I got this great opportunity to be a part of the revolution, so I went."

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Few people can lay claim to discovering the cure for an epidemic, searching for life on Mars, providing intellectual support to the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States and serving in the Canadian army. Even fewer can say that in addition to all that, they had a close, personal relationship with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of righteous memory. But Velvl Greene is one of a kind. Greene, 77, chair of epidemiology and public health and professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University, and director of the Lord Jacobovitz Center for Jewish Medical Ethics in Be'er Sheva, was not always a religious man. Greene, who now lives in Be'er Sheva with his wife, Gail and close to most of their five children and 27 grandchildren, discovered Judaism by accident. Today, the man of science says he sees no contradiction between science, his first love; and Torah, his second. The rest of the story * Hazan