Dan H. Yaalon

Dan H. Yaalon was born in 1924 in Uherské Hradiště

Yaalon was born Hardy Berger in 1924 in Uherské Hradiště, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish family in the textile trade. He was the youngest of three children and belonged to the Maccabi youth movement. His father died when he was 10.

After the Nazi occupation in 1939, he went to a Youth Aliyah school in Prague and then to a Zionist farm training program in Denmark. He began studies in Copenhagen in 1943, fled to Sweden, and worked as an assistant to soil chemist Sante Emil Mattson in Uppsala. His mother was killed in Auschwitz, and he finished a B.Sc. in agricultural sciences in Denmark in 1947.

He reached Israel in July 1948 and joined the IDF in 1949. During his service he took part in the first geological surveys of the Negev, which later became central to his research. He then taught chemistry and agriculture at Beit Yerach school.

In 1951 he took the family name Yaalon and kept Hardy as a middle name. A mountain and a wadi in the southern Arava were named after him. He was active in INQUA and the international soil science society, and received the Sarton Medal and the Dokuchaev Award. He died in 2014.