Ilan Ramon

Origins and early life

Ilan Ramon was born Ilan Wolfferman in Ramat Gan on 20 June 1954 and grew up in Beersheba, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family the century had already marked: his father Eliezer came from Germany, whose family fled Nazi persecution in 1935, and his mother Tonya and his grandmother came from Poland and survived Auschwitz, reaching Israel in 1949.

Work and career

He Hebraized the family name to Ramon on entering the Israeli Air Force, as pilots did then; his given name means tree. He began the fighter pilots' course in 1972, broke a hand, served in an electronic-warfare unit in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War and qualified in 1974, flying the A-4 Skyhawk and then the Mirage IIIC before joining, in 1980, the team that stood up Israel's first F-16 squadron. In 1981 he was the youngest pilot on Operation Opera, the strike that destroyed Iraq's unfinished Osiraq reactor, and he flew in Lebanon the year after.

He took a degree in electronics and computer engineering at Tel Aviv University in 1987, commanded an F-16 squadron from 1990, was made a colonel in 1994 and logged more than four thousand flying hours. Chosen as a payload specialist in 1997, he trained at the Johnson Space Center from 1998 and flew STS-107, a sixteen-day research mission whose crew worked two shifts around the clock and ran some eighty experiments. He called himself not religious and observed anyway: the first astronaut to ask for kosher food, keeping the Sabbath in orbit, saying that he felt he was representing all Jews and all Israelis, and carrying up a microfiche Torah given him by President Moshe Katsav, a miniature scroll saved from the Holocaust, a barbed-wire mezuzah, and a pencil drawing called Moon Landscape made by Petr Ginz, murdered at Auschwitz at sixteen.

Later years

Columbia broke apart over Texas on 1 February 2003, sixteen minutes from landing, and Ramon died with his six crewmates; thirty-seven pages of his diary were recovered from the ground and slowly restored, and he became the first foreign recipient of the United States Congressional Space Medal of Honor.