Word: weizmann
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chaim Weizmann of Motol. Russia, son of Osher the timber merchant and Rachel, stood before the Knesset in Jerusalem, taking the oath of office as Israel's first President in 2,000 years. In pain, his eyes seeing dimly through cataracts, he stumbled over the biblical phraseology in his Hebrew address, interjected: "I can't go on." But go on he did, to the end of the address and for almost four lonely and physically painful years afterward. One morning last week, a few days before his 78th birthday, his heart stopped, and Chaim Weizmann, the man, died...
...Chaim Weizmann, the leader, died back in 1946, when he lost control of the world Zionist organization to the activists led by David Ben-Gurion. He had always opposed violence as a betrayal of the Jewish ethic, but Israel, perhaps necessarily, was born with war as the midwife. Weizmann was brushed aside and became a figurehead, enshrined, for past services, in a beautiful home in Rehovoth, surrounded by delicate Ming porcelains and modern French paintings...
National Home. For half a century before that, Weizmann was Zionism. His vibrant, eloquent voice, lowered for emphasis, cutting deftly through details to the essential, was one of the greatest one-man propaganda instruments in history. He turned even his genius for chemistry into a weapon for Zionism. In 1916, when British shells began falling short of the target for want of acetone, a basic component in manufacturing gunpowder, Weizmann, working night & day, discovered a new way of producing acetone in quantity. Gratefully, wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George proffered personal honors; Weizmann graciously declined and said: "There is nothing...
Like the industrial tycoon who likes to call himself a simple country boy, Weizmann would introduce himself as a humble Jew from Motol. He was far more complex. The man from Motol, who came to England's Manchester University as a chemistry lecturer at the age of 32, loved England and English ways. He moved about banquet halls, diplomatic conferences and secret meetings with the aplomb of a great lord, wore an air that had in it traces of Jewish ghetto life, Slavic exoticism and British rectitude. He had none of the frugal, self-denying asceticism of some nationalists...
Since that day, which Chaim Weizmann recorded in his memoirs, Mount Scopus has been transfigured more than once by the people of Israel. Over the years, 17 grey concrete buildings have gone up. There are streamlined laboratories, the greatest library in the Near East, schools of law, agriculture, humanities and Oriental studies. The only trouble is, the Hebrew University can use none of these buildings. Since 1948, the road to Mount Scopus has been under the control...