The acceptance of nursing as a profession taught in universities reflects basic changes in the essence of nursing as a vocation. The characteristics of university-level education include a specific and unique body of knowledge, entrance requirements, training requirements for practice, and a maximum of autonomy. These factors are shaping the status of nursing in the academic community, health services, and society at large. In 1918, the members of the American Zionist Medical Unit (AZMU) from New York (which later became the Hadassah Medical Organization [HMO] in Jerusalem), headed by Henrietta Szold, founded the Hadassah School of Nursing in Jerusalem and brought about a revolution in nursing in the country. The school awarded 1,400 Registered Nurse diplomas from 1921 to 1975, the year the university school of nursing opened.1 The idea of offering a university nursing education arose as early as the 1920s. In 1975, Hadassah, a pioneer and role model in health services in Israel, focused on introducing the first basic university curriculum for nurses. This article describes the transformation of nursing into an academically grounded profession, and the social and ideological context in which the transformation occurred, first under the British Mandate for Palestine (1918-1948) and then in die State of Israel (hereafter Israel) up to 1984. It augments the work of Lea Zwanger and Rivka Adams-Stockier.2 It is based on interviews with eighteen personalities significant in the transformation of nursing education, die memoirs of one of die coauthors (Judith Steiner-Freud), archival documents, and the professional literature.3 Europe has only a few university-level nursing programs. European university nursing education was only inaugurated in Britain in the 1930s, Germany in the 1960s, Austria and the Netherlands in the 1980s, and Switzerland in the 1990s.4 The movement of nursing education into universities in early twentieth century United States is therefore especially relevant to contemporary developments in pre-Israel Palestine and Israel.5 In the early decades of the twentieth century, American institutions of higher education were modifying their goals and adapting themselves to the needs of society by encouraging applied knowledge, new fields of study, and students from a wide range of social classes.6 As a women's profession, however, nursing had more difficulty than other fields due to colleges' reluctance to admit women; opposition by doctors' organizations, which were worried about possible harm to the status of physicians; and the question of whether nursing was a field worthy of study in an academic setting.7 This is the context of the struggle of leading nurses such as Isabel A. Hampton-Robb, Lavinia L. Dock, Lillian Wald, Adelaide Nutting, and Isabel Stewart. The American literature describes three trends in collegiate nursing education in this period:8 (1) an independent nursing school in a university, as at Yale; (2) studies in a college setting combined with a diploma track in a school of nursing, as at the Universities of Michigan and California and Northwestern University; (3) continuing university education programs in nursing for nurses who had completed the basic requirements for a diploma or baccalaureate degree, as at Teachers College, Columbia University. All three models were recognized and eventually partly adopted in Israel. In American society, the economics of hospital based nurses' training and the need for nurses' labor were among the main obstacles to making nursing education an academic pursuit at the university level.9 This argument has also been very important in Israel, a financially strained society that concentrates its resources on building itself-a society in need of working hands. In fact, according to Judith T. Shuval and Ofra Anson, efforts in Israel to convert nursing into a profession that requires a university degree may be described in terms of political struggle. …