Israel Reichert

Israel Reichert was born in 1891 in Ozorków

Israel Reichert was born in 1891 in Ozorków, Poland, to a religious and well-off family. As a child he studied at a yeshiva headed by Rabbi Reines. He moved to the Land of Israel in 1908.

He worked as a farm laborer and studied at the Hebrew teachers seminary in Jerusalem. From 1911 he taught at the Ezra school in Haifa. He then studied biology at the University of Berlin and completed a doctorate on the fungi of Egypt in 1921.

Otto Warburg and Yitzhak Wilkansky invited him to lead plant disease research at their agricultural experiment station. He headed its plant pathology department from 1922 to 1959. His department studied the factors behind plant diseases, and he studied the effect of dew on leaf diseases.

He co-founded the Palestine Journal of Botany in 1938. He became a lecturer at the agriculture institute in Rehovot in 1943 and a full professor in 1949. He received the Israel Prize for life sciences in 1955.

He married pianist Nadia Ettingon-Reichert in 1928. After retiring as department head in 1959, he kept working there until 1968. He died in 1975 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul cemetery.