OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Ephraim Katzir

Ephraim Katzir, 93, Israel’s fourth president and an internationally recognized biophysicist, died Saturday at his home in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, after a brief illness, according to news reports.

Katzir’s 1973-78 tenure spanned two seminal events in Israeli history: the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977.

He left the presidency after one term to return to scientific research.

Born in 1916 in Kiev, Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire, Katzir immigrated at age 6 with his family to British-ruled Palestine and studied biology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, receiving his doctorate in 1941, according to his official biography on the Foreign Ministry website.

He served in the Haganah, the underground Jewish defense organization, where he helped set up a military research and development unit that developed explosives, propellants and other munitions.

During the war that followed Israel’s independence in 1948, he was appointed head of the military’s science corps. He served as the Israeli military’s chief scientist from 1966 to 1968, the website said.

Katzir was a founder of Israel’s renowned Weizmann Institute of Science and headed its biophysics department, where his work on synthetic protein models deepened understanding of the genetic code and immune responses.