Remembering Ilan Ramon

Throughout the world, Jews are mourning the loss of Colonel Ilan Ramon- Israel’s first astronaut, who died tragically when the space shuttle Columbia exploded on February 1. In our Kislev issue, BABAGANEWZ spoke with Ramon prior to the launch. He expressed his excitement about space travel and his love for the Jewish community, saying that as an Israeli astronaut he wanted to represent all Jews. Despite Ramon’s untimely death, his hope for unity among the Jewish people and for scientific discovery lives on.

Ramon has become a symbol of hope and pride for both Israel and the Jewish people. Because his mother is a Holocaust survivor, and his father is a veteran of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Ramon understood that all Jews could share in his personal achievement. “I’m proof for my parents and their generation that whatever we’ve been fighting for in the last century is coming true,” he said before the launch.

A Man on a Mission

Born in 1954 in Tel Aviv, Ramon was a colonel in the Israeli Air Force, and participated in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the Lebanon War in 1982. In 1981, he flew one of the F-16 jets that destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor. He attended Tel Aviv University and received a bachelor of science degree in electronics and computer engineering in 1987. On the Columbia, he conducted environmental research. He was married and had four children.

“I feel like I represent all Israelis and the Jewish community all over the world,” Ramon told BABAGANEWZ in the Kislev issue. Although Ramon was not religiously observant, he insisted on eating only kosher food aboard the space shuttle. He even said the Shema as the shuttle flew over Jerusalem.

“I think it is very, very important to preserve our historical tradition,” he explained to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon while in space, “and I mean historical and religious traditions.”

Ramon brought several religious items with him into space including a mezuzah, a Kiddush cup, a book of Psalms, and a credit card-size microfiche copy of the Bible, given to him by Israel’s president, Moshe Katsav. He also brought a small Torah scroll that Holland’s chief rabbi had given to a boy whom he tutored to become a bar mitzvah while the two were imprisoned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The boy, Yehoyachin Yosef, survived the Holocaust, moved to Israel, and was the scientist who contributed to the main experiment that Ramon performed in space.

Days of Hope

During the conversation with Sharon, Ramon explained the significance of bringing into space a Torah that had survived the Holocaust. He said that it symbolized “more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive everything, including horrible periods, and go from the darkest days to days of hope and faith in the future.”

So too, officials with both the U.S. and Israeli space programs have vowed to continue the important research of Ramon and his crewmates. “The day will come when other Israeli astronauts will be launched into space,” Sharon said after the tragedy. “I am certain that the memory of Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first space pioneer, will be etched in our hearts.”