Uriel Bachrach

Uriel Bachrach was born in 1926 in Germany

Uriel Bachrach was born in Heilbronn, Germany, in 1926 to a family of doctors. In 1933 the family moved to the Land of Israel and settled in Petah Tikva, where his father served as the town doctor. The family was religious Zionist.

He finished high school at Moriah in Tel Aviv in 1944. In 1945 he moved to Jerusalem and began studying chemistry at the Hebrew University. He earned a master's degree in biochemistry in 1949, a master's degree in microbiology in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1953.

He served in the Haganah and commanded a platoon in the religious Gadna battalion in Jerusalem. He was among 20 science students who formed HEMED, the Israeli Science Corps, which developed weapons before and after the founding of the state. He also took part in operations using the new weapons in the field.

He joined the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University and in 1971 became a full professor and chair of the department of molecular biology. His research focused on polyamines, molecular biology and cancer. He was a visiting professor at universities in America and Europe.

He wrote a Hebrew book on the founding of HEMED in 2009 and an English version in 2016. He married Esther Zachrin in 1955 and, after their divorce, Zohara Yaniv in 1998. He lives in Yemin Moshe in Jerusalem and heads the old Beit Israel synagogue there.