Heinrich Mendelssohn (biologist)

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Heinrich Mendelssohn , Hebrew היינריך מנדלסון (born October 31, 1910 in Berlin ; died November 19, 2002 ) was an Israeli biologist.

Life

Heinrich Mendelssohn was the son of the Berlin merchant Paul Joseph Mendelssohn (1869–1945) and Lucie Ludnovsky. He was one of the descendants of Moses Isserles , whose acronym "Rema" is therefore on his tombstone.

As a teenager he became a member of the Zionist hiking club Blau-Weiß . As a student in Vienna, he joined the Zionist Kadimah (student union) . He studied zoology and medicine at the University of Berlin from 1928 to 1933 , a fellow student there was the future zoologist and colleague in Tel Aviv Alexander Barash .

After the seizure of power in 1933 he had to break off his studies. He emigrated to Palestine with financial support from his family. His parents and sister also had to emigrate in 1935. He continued his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in 1934 became an assistant to Shimon Bodenheimer (1897-1959). In 1935 he married Tamar Pressmann, who was born in Palestine. At Bodenheimer he passed his master’s examination in 1935 with a thesis on desert snails and received his doctorate in 1940 with a dissertation on the population density of wild birds. In 1940 he and Heinz Steinitz discovered the Israeli disc beater in the Chula plain . Your first description of this frog was published in 1943 in the journal Copeia .

Latonia nigriventer
MENDELSSOHN & STEINITZ, 1943 (photo 2011)

From 1935 to 1953 he worked in teacher training at the Biological-Pedagogical Institute in Tel Aviv , which then merged into Tel Aviv University. At the university he was dean and head of the zoological department from 1953 to 1956, and in 1961 he was dean of the natural science faculty. In 1970 he was appointed professor and in 1977 received the chair for wildlife reserves. With his studies of the effects of pesticides used in agriculture, he is one of the pioneers in this research area.

In 1953 he was one of the leading founders of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) with Azariah Alon, JH Hoofien and Amotz Zahavi . A new law passed by the Knesseth in 1955 for the protection of wild animals goes back to him . However, they largely lost the fight for the preservation of the habitats in the wetlands of the Chula Plain, as at the end of the dispute only ten percent of the region was elevated to a reserve, as the area was funded by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) for the expansion of agriculture due to population pressure complaints were made. Mendelssohn's prediction that the intensive cultivation enforced by Yosef Weitz would result in the salinisation of the soil later came true.

In 1962 he headed an international conference on nature conservation in Israel. He was a member of the advisory board of the national nature conservation authority. In 1966 he was accepted into the Israel Academy of Sciences .

Awards

Fonts

  • with Azaria Alon; Yoram Yom-Tov (Ed.): Plants and animals of the land of Israel: an illustrated encyclopedia . Vol.7: Mammals. The publishing house society for protection of nature, 1987.

literature

  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 2 Munich: Saur 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 802
  • Henning Eikenberg: Nature conservation in Israel - the contribution by Heinrich Mendelssohn , in: Gert Gröning, Joachim Wolschke-Buhlmahn (Eds.): Nature conservation and democracy? Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006, ISBN 3-89975-077-2 , pp. 131-135

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Amos Rubin: Patriarch of Zoology , in: Haaretz , February 10, 2012
  2. ^ A b Henning Eikenberg: Nature Conservation in Israel , 2006
personal data
SURNAME Mendelssohn, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mendelson, Haynrikh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli biologist and conservationist
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 19, 2002