Moshe Levy (chemist) - Birth and Education

Birth and Education

Moshe Levy was born on December 8, 1927 in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 1933 his father, Eliyahu, decided to immigrate to Palestine, then under British occupation. He grew up in the southern part of Tel-Aviv and attended the Alliance Elementary School and the Balfour High School. After graduating from high school, he went to work as a laboratory assistant at the Zeiff Institute in Rehovot. There, with the help of Chaim Weizmann (later the first president of the State of Israel) he obtained a scholarship to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shortly after enrolling at the Hebrew University, he was called, as a member of the Haganah, to fight in the Israeli War of Independence in Jerusalem, and only returned to the university in September 1949. He received a Masters degree in Physical Chemistry in 1952. He finished his Ph.D. in 1955 after two years at the College of Forestry, State University of New York, Syracuse, SUNY-ESF, under the supervision of Michael Szwarc. He has been married to Joan Dvora Sugerman since 1955, and has two children, Sharona T. Levy and Alon Yitzchak Halevy, and has four grandchildren, Danielle and Itamar Menuhin, and Karina and Kasper Halevy. He lives in Rehovot, Israel.