Belgium Honors Israeli Physicist
Belgium will bestow its highest civilian honor on Daniel Zajfman, an Israeli physicist and president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Zajfman, who was born in Brussels and immigrated to Israel in 1979, will receive the title of Commander of the Order of Leopold on Nov. 4 in a small ceremony at the Embassy of Belgium in Tel Aviv for his efforts to advance science, according to the Belgian Royal House.
Zajfman told JTA he was “deeply honored” to receive the title of commander, the third highest of the order’s five classes. The two top classes are reserved for the king and public servants.
The Forum of Jewish Organizations, which represents Flemish Jews, congratulated Zajfman, saying it is an honor “which he has most certainly deserves.”
His research in part has focused on the formation of complex molecules in outer space. He gained an undergraduate degree in physics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1983 and then a Ph.D. in atomic physics from the institution in 1989.
In 2003, he arrived at the Weizmann Institute as an associate professor and three years later was named the institution’s president.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO