Revital Wallach, a graduate of Baharan Ulpana in Gedera and daughter of mathematician parents, competed against 370 participants from 74 countries, and earned the honor of being the world’s top-performing student in physics.
Wallach was born in Moreshet, a village in the Lower Galilee, to an especially large family (Revital has 10 siblings). In 9th grade, she began her studies at Baharan Ulpana in Gedera. “From a young age I loved sciences, enjoyed learning and dreamed of being a scientist”, she says. “In 10th grade I got the opportunity to participate in research as part of the Alpha program at Ariel University. I wrote a final paper and encountered the world of scientific research for the first time”. Through the program, she heard about Israel’s science teams and tried out for the physics team. At the end of 12th grade, she already participated in the Asian Physics Olympiad, where she received an honorable mention, and then in the International Physics Olympiad, where she won the gold medal.
Currently, she is a student in the Technion’s excellence program. “I feel satisfaction when I learn new things, I wake up out of curiosity”, says Wallach about what drives her. “In the long term, I want to do something that will improve the world, or discover something that humanity doesn’t know. I believe in the scientific method that pushes humanity forward, and I believe in the Torah and the God – and I don’t see a contradiction between the two”.
She was supposed to start her first semester at the Technion at the end of October, but then the war broke out. “I spent this complex period mainly at home with my family. I volunteered as a half temporary replacement for the head coach of Israel’s physics team, and with the help of many of the more experienced (but busy) instructors than me, we managed to run the Hanukkah camp as planned, give routine and meaning to the team’s students and train them for the Olympics”, she recounts, “I wish I could have done more.”
“In the future I see myself with a small family of my own, a professor at one of the universities”, she lays out her plans for the future, “I want to research something that will fascinate me and impact the world. I see myself lecturing and teaching, and also finishing a round of learning the daily Daf Yomi – a project in which one learns a page of Talmud every day, aiming to finish the entire Babylonian Talmud every seven and a half years. In short – to combine Torah and science. Between life as an observant Jew and the scientific world”.
