Herman Branover

Herman Branover was born in 1931 in Riga

Branover was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1931 to an atheist Jewish family. His father, the agronomist Hertz Branover, was killed during World War II. His mother escaped with the children into Russia, and the family returned to Riga in 1945.

He studied at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and finished in 1953, while teaching himself Hebrew from library books. He later earned a D.Sc. in magnetohydrodynamics from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1962.

From 1959 to 1971 he was a senior researcher at the Latvian Academy of Sciences. In Riga he joined the underground Chabad movement and helped start the Jewish revival in the USSR, and the KGB arrested and questioned him often. After applying to emigrate in 1971 he lost his job, and at the end of 1972 he received an exit visa.

In Israel he became a professor at Ben-Gurion University, where he founded a magnetohydrodynamics center in 1977. He developed a method to produce electricity from liquid metal in a magnetic field and co-founded SATEC in 1987. He led the Shamir association, which published Jewish books in Russian, and founded the journal B'Or Ha'Torah.

In 1998 a movement tried to run him for President of Israel, but he lacked the needed support of Knesset members. His wife Fania died in 2012. He died on 4 May 2026 and was buried on the Mount of Olives.