Yaakov Ben-Tor

Yaakov Ben-Tor was born in 1910 in Königsberg

Ben-Tor was born Kurt Winter in Königsberg, Germany, in 1910. He studied law in Königsberg and Berlin, and linguistics at the Sorbonne in Paris. After the Nazis rose to power, he moved to the Land of Israel in 1933 and changed his name.

He joined the geology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and went to Switzerland for doctoral studies. When World War II began he was arrested there as a suspected German spy, and he fled back home. In 1945 he became the first person to receive a doctorate from the Hebrew University, and he later earned a second doctorate from the Sorbonne.

From 1944 to 1948 he sat in the Assembly of Representatives for the Aliyah Hadashah party. He was active in the Haganah and served in its science corps. During the War of Independence he took part in geological mapping of the Negev, which found phosphates and copper.

He led the Israel Geological Society in 1953 and became director of the Geological Survey in 1954. He later headed the geology department at the Hebrew University and retired from it in 1977. He then worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

The mineral bentorite, found in 1980, was named after him. He died in 2002. His son is the archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tor.