Michael Zohary

Michael Zohary was born in 1898 in Bibrka

Michael Schein, later Zohary, was born in 1898 to a Jewish family in Bóbrka, near Lviv in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He moved to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1920 and first worked building roads.

He studied at the Hebrew Teachers' Seminary in Jerusalem from 1922 to 1925. He then worked in the botany unit of an institute for agriculture and natural sciences, which later came under the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a PhD in 1936.

In 1931 he helped Alexander Eig and Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan found the National Botanic Garden of Israel on Mount Scopus. He became a lecturer in 1945 and professor of botany in 1952, and he introduced the principle of antiteleochory about seed dispersal in desert plants. His books include The Plant Life of Israel, volumes of Flora Palaestina, Geobotanical Foundations of the Middle East and A New Analytical Flora of Israel.

He retired in 1967 but kept working as professor emeritus, and his last book, Plants of the Bible, appeared in 1982. He died in Jerusalem in 1983. His son Daniel Zohary was also a botanist, and 3 plant species are named after him.