The first academic unit at the Hebrew University bearing a title including "folklore" was established as an undergraduates minor program in 1970 by Professor Dov Noy, who had already been teaching folkloristic approaches to the study of Midrash and Talmud since 1955, at the Department of Hebrew Literature. The unit resided at the Institute of Jewish Studies in the Mazer Building on the Givat Ram Campus, at the far end of the corridor of the second floor, close to the back stairs, a glass door separating it from other adjacent units (Hebrew Literature). The teaching unit was accompanied by the Folklore Research Center (at the Terra Sancta Building off campus). Noy was in parallel cultivating the nationwide network of folk narrators who among other activities met with his students at the Hebrew University annually. As the years went by, tens of scholars with HU PhD titles in Jewish Folklore or Hebrew Folk Literature found positions in various institutions connected to the then Ministry of Education and Culture, as supervisors, school principals, authors and editors of school books, teachers at teachers' colleges, as curators at collections and museums, founders and directors of centers for ethnic and community culture, and engaged with both the Jewish and Arabic citizens of Israel. Their contributions introduced to all these institutions special knowledge and sensitivities to cultural, ethnic and class diversity.
Professor Galit Hasan-Rokem, Noy's disciple who had joined him at the Department of Hebrew Literature in the late nineteen-seventies, initiated in the mid-nineteen-nineties the transformation of the Folklore minor program to a full-fledged undergraduate Folklore major program, where students could earn a BA in Jewish and Comparative Folklore. Graduate work for MA and PhD degrees in Folklore was carried out as individual programs of the Faculty of the Humanities produced the core of the Folklore Program that continued to provide accomplished scholars in the field. These scholars have since populated most of the folklore and folk literature positions in Israeli Universities.