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Ilan Ramon

By Harry Berkowitz and Tami Luhby | Staff Writers

February 1, 2003

The space flight that ended in disaster yesterday had been full of symbolism and pride both for former fighter pilot Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, and his combat-weary country.

Ramon, 48, whose mother survived the Auschwitz death camp and whose father fought for Israeli independence, had said he represented all Jews and all Israelis and their ability to survive and persevere even during horrible periods.

Ramon was the youngest of the eight Israeli F-16 fighter-bomber pilots who in 1981 destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor near Baghdad, Iraq, that Israel said was meant to create nuclear weapons. He also took part in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and flew bombing missions over Lebanon in 1982.

While Ramon said he was not a religiously observant Jew, out of respect for co-religionists who are, he asked that his meals on the shuttle be made kosher. And he said he would try to keep the Sabbath while in space, getting instruction from rabbis that he should time the observance to the rising and setting of the sun at Mission Control in Houston.

He carried symbols of his role as a representative of Jews, including a small black-and-white drawing of Earth called "Moon Landscape drawn by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old boy who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. During his training, he told a Jewish group in New York that his journey fulfills the dream of Ginz, whose drawings he called "a testimony to the triumph of the spirit.

Ramon also carried into space a wallet-sized Torah smuggled out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Ramon was born in a Tel Aviv suburb on June 20, 1954. He became hooked on flying at age 16, when a neighbor took him for a ride in a small Cessna. He left the Air Force in 1983 in pursuit of an electrical and computer engineering degree from Tel Aviv University and returned to military service in 1987.

Since 1998, Ramon had been living with his wife, Rona, and three sons and a daughter -- ages 5 to 14 -- in Houston to train at the Johnson Space Center.

Ramon's relatives in Israel were flying last night to Houston in an Israeli air force plane.

"It's very difficult to explain my reaction, said his sister-in-law, Orna Barr. "He was a wonderful person. A wonderful father and very talented. You do not find people like him anymore. He loved his job and his country.

The soft-spoken and boyishly handsome Ramon recently told one interviewer he did not fear the prospect of an accident in space. "I have been in the business of flying for over 30 years, he said. "During my time in the Israeli Air Force I lost many friends, most of them in accidents. The prospect of an accident in space is small.

Staff writer Katia Hetter contributed to this story.