Chaim Weizmann

   
Chaim Weizmann ca. 1921

1874 - born in Motol near Pinsk in western Russia, was influenced by his father Ozer Weizmann who began to change from traditional religious orthodoxy to modern secular nationalism.

1892 - moved to Berlin to study chemistry.

1896 - Theodr Herzl became the father of the Zionist political movement with the publication of Der Judenstadt (The Jewish State).

1901 - Weizmann moved to Geneva, founded the Democratic Faction to promote cultural Zionism rather than the political goals of Herzl.

1903 - British Foreign Secretary Landsdowne offered Zionists 5,000 sq. mile tract in Uganda, but the Democratic Faction led the rejection of this offer. This caused Weizmann to begin discussions with British leaders such as Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, and Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, the first Jewish member of the British Cabinet who would become governor of the Palestine mandate after the war.

1904 - Weizmann moved to England.

1907 - became senior lecturer at Manchester University, made first visit to Palestine, would begin to help develop schools and settlements, and later played a key role in the creation of a Hebrew University.

1915 - During his research at Manchester University on synthetic rubber, he discovered the fermentation process to produce acetone, a vital ingredient for cordite. His discovery of the acid-resistant microorganism Clostridium Acetobutylicum would be used in England and the United States to make smokeless powder, but later would be the key to the discovery of penicillin.

1916 - The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed May 16 carving up the Mideast between England and France. Weizmann had been influential in the diplomacy leading to the agreement, insuring that Palestine would be internationalized and later become the Zionist state. Many British Jews opposed transferring national allegiance from Great Britain to Palestine during wartime. Weizmann therefore urged Great Britain to publicly support Palestine, and his greatest achievement in the Zionist movement was the alliance with the British government that culminated in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

1917 - The Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2 declared in public "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

1919 - Weizmann led the Zionist delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.

1921 - Visited the United States with Albert Einstein, was elected president of the World Zionist Organization, but American Zionists such as Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise who sought complete autonomy for a homeland opposed Weizmann's alliance with Britain and European Jews.

1930 - Weizmann resigned his position as president of the Zionist Organization to protest British treatment of Jews in Palestine, but still hoped his alliance with the British would lead to a homeland. Rabbi Wise however, told Weizmann the next year, ''You have sat too long at English feasts.''

1937 - Weizmann supported the Peel Plan for a partition of the mandate, giving Zionists a homeland of 2500 sq. miiles.

1944 - Weizmann opposed the "cancer" of the radical anti-British terror campaign of the Irgun Zvai Leumi fighters, calling its leader Menachem Begin ''a megalomaniac suffering from a Messianic complex.''

1945 - After the end of the war, Weizmann urged the British to decide the issue of a Jewish homeland

1946 - In December, Weizmann gave his last speech to a Zionist Congress, and was provoked by a heckler to declare again his opposition to Zionist extremists demanding immediate statehood or war: ''Would that my tongue were tipped with flame, and my soul touched with the strength of our great prophets, when they warned against following the paths of Babylon and Egypt which always led Jewry to failure. I fear that we stand before such dangers today . . . Go and re-read Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. . . . Zion will be redeemed through righteousness, and not by any other means.''

1948 - Israel declared its independence.

1949 - Weizmann became the first president of Israel.

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