Felix Bergmann

Obituary / Professor Felix Bergmann, 1908-2002 The liberal rabbi Julius Bergmann taught his eight children that the most important thing in life is to learn. By Uri Dromi | Feb. 27, 2002 | 12:00 AM

The liberal rabbi Julius Bergmann taught his eight children that the most important thing in life is to learn. Theodore Bergmann, today a professor of agricultural economy in Stuttgart, recalls how the eldest brother, Ernst David, taught the younger brothers and how everyone went out to tutor the rural children in order to help the family cope with the difficult living conditions after World War I.

Like Ernst David, the fourth brother, Felix, studied chemistry at the University of Berlin. When Hitler came to power, the Jews were ordered to complete their studies by August 1933 when they would be expelled. Felix managed to submit his doctoral thesis in chemistry as well as one in medicine (medicine alone bored him, he later related, because half of the material was about syphilis) and left Germany, without his degrees, headed for Palestine. Together with Ernst, he joined the Daniel Sieff Research Institute (the forerunner of the Weizmann Institute of Science), in Rehovot immediately after its establishment in 1934.

After the 1936 riots, the underground defense organization, Haganah, was searching for a more effective explosive than the one they had been using, which ruined easily. Bergmann supplied them with what they needed with the production of tein, which became the primary explosive in hand grenades (some say the name is an abbreviation of a long Latin name, while others claim it's from the Hebrew tein od - give me more). Bergmann conducted his experiments in the courtyard of the Sieff Institute, much to the chagrin of its president at the time, Chaim Weizmann, who was concerned about the watchful eyes of the British.

In 1947, Bergmann went to the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to continue his studies, but they were cut short with the outbreak of the War of Independence in Israel. He found some Jewish scientists and got them together to work toward the development of a rocket. They conducted their experiments on the upstate New York estate of a wealthy Jew, where a noisy watermill drowned out the booms of the explosives. Later on, Bergmann brought the whole group to Israel and housed them at the Kurdani camp, one of the science corps' bases, so they could develop the bazooka. During another continuing study program at Columbia University, Bergmann worked on research into the enzyme, acetylcholinesterase, being conducted by the scientists I.B. Wilson and D. Nachmansohn and this brought him back to working in the field of medicine. He returned to Israel and from nothing he created the department of pharmacology at the Hebrew University school of medicine.

His brother Ernst David, who was Ben-Gurion's scientific adviser and one of the architects of Israel's nuclear capabilities, was a winner of the Israel prize and has Rafael Armament Development Authority's Institute 3 - The David Institute - named after him. Aharon, another brother, is the name behind the famous High Court of Justice ruling, the Aharon ruling, which annulled a Knesset law for the first time (The Party Financing Law).

Felix Bergmann was a member of the Israel Academy of Science and distinguished scientific organizations around the world, but kept far away from the spotlight. His student, Prof. Shalom Sarel, recalls he was never condescending and always treated all of his students as equals, "but when I entered his lab, I knew immediately that he was a giant and I wasn't," he says. Prof. Yehuda Gutman chose to study pharmacology with him only because during one of his classes, Prof. Bergmann listened to his students' ideas, inviting them to continue the discussion in the evening and finally even accepted their opinions. His many students, all of them leading professors in Israel, recall a meticulous teacher who believed that only hard work yields results, but who always offered a shoulder to lean on and was ready to listen. He believed in experiments on animals because he felt that you could never learn from a theoretical model what you could learn from a real experiment. He did not get along with computers and clung to his typewriter. At the same time, he would kick students out of his lab if they went for a coffee break and had left a cat on a respirator unsupervised on the table.

After his retirement in 1979, Bergmann was on his way to a brief sabbatical at the University of Shiraz in Iran when he received a telegram: "Don't come, Khomeini has seized power." He continued to come to his lab daily, deftly skipping up the stairs carrying heavy equipment. He did not miss any interesting lecture and amazed all with his sharp questions, even in areas that were not his expertise. Until recently, Bergmann was still busy writing scientific articles and advising students.