The occasion was the inauguration of Haifa and the North's first Graduate School of Dentistry, a mutual venture of Rambam Medical Center and the Technion's Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. This achievement was fifteen years in the making, and is enhanced by a contract with Harvard University to conduct joint academic research.

The new school's mission is to increase the number of dental specialists in Israel by providing postgraduate education in endodontics, orthodontics, periodontics, pedodontics and maxillofacial reconstruction. In addition, the school will provide hospital-wide advanced training and consultation to physicians whose specialties converge with dentistry -- e.g., cardiology or infectious diseases.

The event was attended by Departmental staff members, their families, and tens of top dentists from throughout the country, and was addressed by joyous speaker after speaker in remarks lauding the new school's historic importance for the State and priceless significance for Northern Israel's residents. Prof. Eli Machtei, Chairman of the Department of Periodontology, Director of the school and the driving force behind the school's establishment, emceed.   
 
Lovely musical interludes were provided by harpist Olga Moitlis and violinist Leonid Rotshtein of the duo Amoré. But perhaps because dentistry concerns the lower face, all was not high-brow; the Spencer Auditorium lights dimmed, and Prof. Machtei, a cineaste and amateur historian of film, regaled his audience with clips from a dozen movies stereotyping dentists as, in his words, "sadists [e.g., Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man (1976)], drug dealers and buffoons." Prof. Machtei brought the event to a happy ending by screening a scene from Cactus Flower (1969) in which dentist Dr. Julian Winston (Walter Matthau) sensitively romances his Assistant, Miss Dickinson (Ingrid Bergman).