Lev Bergelson

Lev Bergelson was born in 1918 in Haisyn

Lev Bergelson was born in 1918 in Haisyn, in Soviet Ukraine. He was the only son of Tzipora and David Bergelson, a Yiddish prose writer. The family moved to Berlin in 1921, then to Copenhagen, and settled in Moscow in 1934.

He finished his studies at the chemistry faculty of Moscow University in 1941. During the war he taught German at a Red Army intelligence school, and from 1942 he fought at the front. Shortly before leaving for the front he married Naomi Ostrover.

In 1946 he joined the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry. His father was arrested in 1949 and executed in 1952 over membership in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1951 Bergelson was arrested with his wife and daughter, and he and his wife were exiled to northern Kazakhstan, where he worked as a coal miner.

He returned to Moscow in 1954 and took up science. He completed his doctorate in 1961, founded the first lipid laboratory in the Soviet Union in 1962, and joined the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1968. His research dealt with lipids in cell membranes under conditions such as atherosclerosis and cancer.

In 1991 he immigrated to Israel with his wife, and Israel recognized them as Prisoners of Zion. He served as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He died in 2014 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.