Chaim Weizmann

Biography

Chaim Weizmann was born in 1874 in Motal, near Pinsk in the Russian Empire, the third of fifteen children of a timber merchant. After high school in Pinsk he studied chemistry at the technical colleges of Darmstadt and Berlin and took his doctorate at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1899. He taught at the University of Geneva and in 1904 moved to the University of Manchester as a senior lecturer, becoming a British subject in 1910.

At Manchester he developed a bacterial fermentation process for making acetone, vital for cordite during the First World War, and from 1916 to 1919 he directed the Admiralty laboratories. The standing this gave him in London helped him, as president of the English Zionist Federation from 1917, to win over Arthur Balfour and secure the Balfour Declaration. In January 1919 he signed an agreement with Emir Faisal and put the Zionist case to the Paris Peace Conference.

He led the World Zionist Organization in 1921–31 and again in 1935–46, worked closely with Britain while pressing for Jewish immigration to Palestine, told the Peel Commission in 1936 of Europe's six million Jews with nowhere to go, and helped found the Hebrew University. In 1934 he founded the Daniel Sieff Research Institute at Rehovot, later renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science.

After Israel's independence he chaired the Provisional State Council, and in February 1949 the Knesset elected him the country's first president. The office gave him little real power, and he lived mostly at Rehovot until his death in November 1952.