Chaim Weizmann Of Israel Is Dead
Chaim Weizmann Of Israel Is Dead
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
TEL AVIV, Israel, Sunday, Nov. 9--President Chaim Weizmann of Israel died at 6:30 this  morning in his home in Rehovot, near here, after a long illness. He would have been 78  years old on Nov. 27.
Respiratory inflammation was declared to be a principal cause of his death.
Dr. Weizmann, a world-famed chemist, was an early Zionist and the natural choice to be  Israel's first President when the new nation came into being May 14, 1948.
Led Adventurous Life
Chaim Weizmann's life was sufficiently full of adventure, romance, accomplishment and  fulfillment to have been lived by a dozen men. He was a world-famous scientist, a  statesman, leader of a forceful political movement, an intellectual and, above all, a great  humanitarian.
In the three-quarters of a century through which he lived, he experienced every emotion:  reward, for priceless scientific achievement; despair, when the great prize seemed lost, and  triumph, when the prize--his lifelong dream of a Jewish home in Palestine--was achieved.
Few great men have had more humble beginnings. He was born on Nov. 27, 1874, in the  village of Motele, near Pinsk, Russia. He lived to become the first president of the modern  state of Israel and to see pour into its borders the hundreds of thousands of homeless,  abandoned European Jews.
Many strong men and women, people of great courage, skill and ability, have contributed to  the growth of Israel. His life epitomized the task of all of them in transforming Palestinian  deserts into sections of rolling forests, lush olive and orange groves, irrigation and water- power projects, and centers of science and industry in the undeveloped Middle East.
Theodor Herzl was the founder of the modern Zionist movement; Dr. Weizmann gave it  practical direction. He acted as a moderator among the bitterly quarreling Zionist factions.
Perhaps his principal contribution to the movement came as a result of his work as a  scientist in the first World War. His reward was the Balfour Declaration. It became the key  to ultimate Zionist victory.
As head of the British Admiralty Laboratories from 1917 to 1919, Dr. Weizmann developed  a process for the manufacture of synthetic acetone at a time when the British needed it  desperately. He isolated certain organisms found in cereals and horse chestnuts and within a  month had created synthetic acetone for British explosives.
He was also credited with having suggested to David Lloyd George the strategy of the  campaign against Turkey which resulted ultimately in Allenby's victorious march on  Jerusalem. For all these services the British Prime Minister asked him what he wanted in  return.
Dr. Weizmann refused any monetary reward or a title, and said, "There is only one thing I  want--a national home for my people."
The Balfour Declaration, issued in November, 1917, followed. It was Britain's promise to  facilitate the Jews in making a homeland in Palestine and was hailed as the Magna Carta of  the Zionist movement.
It was supported by a joint resolution of the Congress of the United States and led Jews  everywhere to believe the redemption of Palestine was assured. The declaration was a  central factor in Jewish aspirations even in the darkest days when war, then changes in  British policy, including support of the Arab position, seemed to doom the whole idea of a  Jewish homeland.
Son of Timber Merchant
Dr. Weizmann was the third child of Reb Oizer and Rachel Czermerinsky Weizmann. His  father was a timber merchant, of modest means, who managed with his wife the remarkable  task of sending nine of their fifteen children to universities. He went first to cheder (Jewish  religious school) until he was 11 and then to the Gymnasium in Pinsk, where he made a  brilliant record in science and mathematics.
Years later when he was reputedly asked by Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, if  there were many Zionists like him, Dr. Weizmann, whose celebrated remarks were  legendary, replied, "The roads of Pinsk are paved with them."
He left Russia in 1894 and spent the next four years in Germany at the Technische  Hochschule of Darmstadt and Berlin-Charlottenburg. When a favorite professor joined the  staff of the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Dr. Weizmann went there to study. He  received a doctorate in science in 1900.
Within a year, he took a position as lecturer in organic chemistry at the University of  Geneva, where he taught and continued his research until 1904. He became affiliated,  meanwhile, with the Zionist movement.
It was in Geneva that he met Vera Chatzman, a medical student, whom he married in 1906.  They had two sons, Benjamin and Michael, who was killed in 1944 while flying on patrol  with the British Royal Air Force.
Dr. Weizmann left Geneva to accept a post of the University of Manchester in England and  in 1910 he became a naturalized British subject. He received a D. Sc. from the British  university in 1909 and an LL. D. in 1919.
The only major Zionist conference which Dr. Weizmann failed to attend was the first, in  1897, after Herzl published "Der Judenstaat."
Criticized Herzl's "Vision"
At the age of 27 Dr. Weizmann had dared to criticize Herzl as "too visionary," and in 1900,  at the Fourth Zionist Convention, he emerged as the leader of the Democratic Zionist  faction.
This group opposed both the political Zionists, who wanted political guarantees for the  establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, and the practical Zionists, who wanted to settle Jewish colonies in the Holy Land without regard to political guarantees. Dr. Weizmann  helped reconcile their differences.
His first speech to the biennial Zionist Congress in 1903 proposed the establishment of a  Hebrew University. The proposal was accepted at the Eleventh World Zionist Congress in  1913. Five years later he had the honor of laying the cornerstone of the Hebrew University  on Mount Scopus in Palestine.
On his first visit to Palestine in 1907 he was instrumental in founding the Palestine Land  Development Company. This was typical of this ability to convert ideas into practical  realities.
For fifteen years, while teaching chemistry at the University of Manchester, he headed the "Manchester Group" of British Zionists. In 1906 he met Balfour, who was on an electoral  campaign, and convinced him that Palestine rather than Uganda, British East Africa, which  had been offered by the British, was the proper homeland for the Jews.
After his distinguished services in behalf of the British in the first World War, the main task  he assigned himself was to remind the British of their promise to aid in the establishment of  the Jewish national home.
His efforts led to his appointment as chairman of the first Zionist Commission, established  in March, 1918, and recognized by the British as an official advisory body on all Jewish  questions. He appeared before the Paris Peace Conference in support of his cause.
Dr. Weizmann visited the Arab Prince Feisal in his camp near Amman around this time and  convinced him that the proposed Jewish national home held no existing threat to the Arabs  and that Jewish-Arab cooperation was desirable. He won Arab support to help carry out the  Balfour Declaration, and reached an agreement with Feisal for large-scale Jewish  immigration into Palestine and the protection of Arab rights.
Sought Jewish State in 1919
The Zionist delegation was given a hearing before the Supreme Council of the Peace  Conference on Feb. 27, 1919, at which Robert Lansing, the United States Secretary of State,  asked if the term "a Jewish national home" meant an autonomous government.
Dr. Weizmann replied that they did not ask for the immediate creation of a Jewish  administration but he quite clearly expressed his hope that he would some day see a Jewish  majority in Palestine and the ultimate creation of a Jewish state.
The Zionists found shortly afterward that their principal difficulties were only beginning.  The League of Nations had to be organized and a mandate system worked out. It was not  until August, 1924, that the status of Palestine as a mandated territory was legalized.
From 1920 to 1931, and in 1935, Dr. Weizmann, as president of the World Zionist  Organization, found it necessary to compromise with the British and the Arabs and to  appease his various Zionist opponents. Civil war in Palestine between the Jews and Arabs  added to his difficulties. The Arabs insisted that Palestine had been exclusively theirs for  thirteen centuries; the Jews maintained the right of prior occupation and historical  connections related to their conquest of Palestine in 1200 B.C. Blood flowed freely in  frequent clashes.
In the second World War, the British rejected his proposal to train a Jewish Army. They did  train a Jewish battalion but that did not come into existence until 1944.
No Jewish mission was invited to the United Nations Conference in 1945 and it was not  until 1946, when the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine was created, that  Dr. Weizmann again had an opportunity to make an official plea for a Jewish home and  unrestricted immigration.
In October, 1947, he headed a delegation from the Jewish Agency which presented its case  before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. He accepted at that time the  principle of partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states provided that the Jews were  free to form a "free national unit." On Nov. 30, 1947, the U. N. General Assembly approved  partition, and Jews danced in the streets of Tel Aviv.
Partition was threatened temporarily when the American delegation to the U. N. switched its  position and pressed for a trusteeship. This proposal was turned down, and on May 14,  1948, simultaneously with the withdrawal of the British from Palestine, the Provisional  Government of the new State of Israel was created.
Elected President by Council
On May 16 the thirty-seven council members of the provisional government elected him  president. The honor was accepted on the next day by Dr. Weizmann at his suite here at the  Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, crowning his life's work.
"I dedicate myself to the service of the land and people in whose cause I have been  privileged to labor these many years," he pledged in his message of acceptance.
Dr. Weizmann's first official act of state was to visit President Truman on May 25 at the  White House, where he appealed for funds to build the new country and an end of the arms  embargo which kept the Jews from getting munitions from the United States. An export- import loan of $100,000,000 was authorized several months later, but no action was taken  on the arms embargo.
He was the honorary chairman of the board of directors of Hebrew University and director  of the Daniel Sieff Research Laboratory. His home was in Rehovot near the $4,000,000  Weizmann Institute of Science, which was created for him as a tribute from American Jews.
Dr. Weizmann paid his first visit to the United States as President of Israel in April, 1949.  At a dinner in behalf of the Weizmann Institute, where he was the guest of honor, he  blueprinted the foreign policy of his nation as friendship with all nations whose policy was,  similarly, friendship to Israel regardless of "whether or not they diverge among themselves."
Israel Admitted to U. N.
It was in May, soon after his return to Israel, that Dr. Weizmann realized another significant  goal in his life when the United Nations admitted Israel as a member nation. This came after  he had talked with President Truman during his visit here to participate in celebrations  commemorating the first anniversary of the founding of the new State of Israel on May 4.
It was also in 1949, in June, that Dr. Weizmann finally surrendered his British citizenship to  become a citizen of Israel. And it was two months later that he participated in ceremonies  when the body of Theodore Herzl was brought "home" to Israel from Vienna to be buried on  Mount Herzl.
At the time of his seventy-fifth birthday on Nov. 27, 1949, he stood by while the nation  which granted him the title of being its "father" gave him an eighteen-gun salute. He  foretold its future by saying on a visit to Geneva that "just as some people live by the sword,  we will live by science."
On his seventy-seventh birthday, he was content, as on many other days, to gaze with failing  eyes from his home in Rehovot, across the orange groves, to the white buildings of the  Weizmann Institute. Construction of the institute started in 1944 and each year large sums of  money were contributed here toward additional buildings.
Although in poor health, Dr. Weizmann continued active as President of Israel and president  of the Executive Council of the Weizmann Institute.
In July, 1950, he urged support of United Nations measures to end the war in Korea. Later  the same year he was confronted with the fall of his Cabinet and the formation of a new one.  Early in 1951 he was again confronted with the collapse of the coalition Cabinet under  Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, but despite continued illness he carried on the duties of  his office.
He presided over the first meeting of Israel's new thirteen-man coalition Cabinet on Nov. 3,  1951, and continued to work at his home in Rehovoth, until removed to a hospital four  weeks later.
Dr. Weizmann was re-elected President in November, but a move to name him life President  was dropped after several political parties failed to go along with the proposal.
His illness drastically curtailed his activities in his second term as President, but he was able  to serve as host to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt on her tour of Israel in February, 1952. From  his sickbed at Rehovoth, he issued a message on the fourth anniversary of the Republic the  next April 29.
Addressed "to all citizens of Israel and to all members of the House of Israel," it said: "On  this solemn day I would say this to all my brethren: the future of Israel rests on three  foundations--brotherly love, constructive effort and peace near and far."
His chief work in chemistry was in three fields of research: the synthesis of polycyclic  substances, the production of acetone and butyl alcohol and their derivatives, and the  development of protein foodstuffs for use as meat substitutes.
Always a Moderate
Throughout the years of turmoil and violence he had remained a moderate, and in 1931,  when he relinquished his post as head of the world Zionists, he refused to give ground on  this issue. He expressed his philosophy in a three-hour "farewell address." His words then  might just as well have summed up his views in 1949. He said:
"With a strong national home in Palestine, built up peacefully and harmoniously, we may  expect, in cooperation with the Arabs, also to open up for Jewish endeavor the vast areas  which for their development need intelligence, initiative, organization and finances.
"The constant formulation of excessive demands endangers the safety of the mandate. We  have been searching for other ways and means. In this quest I have not always been  successful, but in laying down my office, formally and definitely, today, I feel that I have  brought the movement a little nearer to its goal. That goal we shall reach."