Uzzi Ornan

Uzzi Ornan was born in 1923 in Jerusalem

Uzzi Ornan was born Uzziel Halperin in Jerusalem in 1923. His parents, Yechiel Halperin, a Hebrew teacher, and Penina, a member of Poale Zion, came to the country in 1919 with the Third Aliyah. The poet Yonatan Ratosh was one of his brothers.

As a young man he was active in the Irgun. The British arrested him in 1944 and held him in detention camps in Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya until 1948. In the camps he taught Hebrew grammar to other detainees.

After his return he studied at the Hebrew University, where he earned a doctorate in Hebrew linguistics and later became a professor. In 1979 he was elected to the Academy of the Hebrew Language and headed its committee on punctuation rules. From 1987 he headed the natural language computing laboratory at the Technion, and he developed a Latin script standard for Hebrew adopted as ISO 259-3.

He led the League Against Religious Coercion as secretary and chairman until 1967. In the 1970s he chaired the Secular Movement, and in the 1990s he led the I am Israeli association, which sought registration of Israeli as a nationality. Some of his remarks on religion drew complaints of incitement.

From 1989 he lived in Nofit. He married the linguist Michal Ephratt in a civil ceremony in the United States in 1994. He died on 3 November 2022 and left his body to science.