Chaim Weizmann

Chaim Weizmann was a Russian-born British chemist and Zionist statesman who served as the first President of Israel from 1949 until his death in 1952. He was born on November 27, 1874, in the small town of Motol (Motyli) in the Russian Empire, now in Belarus, the third of fifteen children of Oizer Weizmann, a timber merchant, and Rachel Leah Tchemerinsky. He grew up in a traditional Jewish home that emphasized both religious learning and secular education.

He studied chemistry in Germany and Switzerland, earning a doctorate summa cum laude from the University of Fribourg in 1899. In 1904 he moved to England to lecture at the University of Manchester, where he developed a fermentation process for producing acetone, a compound urgently needed for British munitions during the First World War.

His wartime service brought him into contact with senior British officials and helped pave the way for the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which the British government endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine. He led the Zionist Commission to Palestine in 1918, served as president of the World Zionist Organization for much of the period from 1920 to 1946, and helped establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the research institute at Rehovot that bears his name.

After lobbying for United Nations recognition of a Jewish state, he was elected the first President of Israel in February 1949 and re-elected in 1951. He continued his scientific interests throughout, but ill health limited his public role. He died on November 9, 1952, at Rehovot, aged 77, and was buried on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute.

The name Chaim is a Hebrew masculine given name meaning "life," carried by him as a blessing of long days that his statesmanship would honor.