Early Days in the Weizmann Institute

When Joe Jaffe stepped off the boat in Tel Aviv in January 1948, the State of Israel did not yet exist and the Weizmann Institute was little more than orange groves and half-built laboratories. Recruited in London by Chaim Weizmann himself, the young spectroscopist spent the next twenty years at the heart of one of the world's great scientific institutions. In twenty-five short, self-contained stories he brings those formative years vividly to life: encounters with the ailing, imperious Weizmann; the day the State was proclaimed—and a vial of tear gas quietly shattered; a flooded wadi and a near-fatal typhoid ride; building the largest infrared spectrometer on earth beneath an auditorium; and founding a hi-tech company on a bet. By turns warm, funny and quietly historic.

Joe Jaffe (J. H. Jaffe) was one of the first spectroscopists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, recruited in London in 1948 by Chaim Weizmann himself. Over the next two decades he built a leading infrared-spectroscopy laboratory—home to the largest infrared spectrometer of its day—earned his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founded Rehovoth Instruments Ltd. A lifelong blue-water sailor, he wrote these recollections from Old Jaffa.