Ada Yonath — chem (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Ada Yonath was born Ada Lifshitz on 22 June 1939 in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem, then in Mandatory Palestine. Her parents, Hillel Lifshitz, who came from a family of rabbis, and Esther Lifshitz, were Zionists who had emigrated in 1933 from Zduńska Wola, a textile town near Łódź; one source gives Łódź itself. Until the First World War Zduńska Wola lay in the Kalisz Governorate of Congress Poland, within the Russian Empire. The parents' birth years are not recorded.
The family was poor. In Jerusalem they shared a flat with other families; her father, a rabbi by training, ran a small grocery and was often in hospital, and he died when she was eleven. In her Nobel autobiography she recalled a childhood shaped by his illness and by a constant desire to understand nature. A year later her mother moved with the children to Tel Aviv to be near her sisters, and Ada finished high school there at Tichon Hadash, paying her fees by tutoring other pupils in mathematics. She then studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taking her bachelor's degree in 1962 and her master's in biochemistry in 1964. She took her doctorate in X-ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1968 and did postdoctoral work at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1970 she set up at the Weizmann Institute what was for nearly a decade the only protein-crystallography laboratory in Israel. Towards the end of the 1970s she set out to determine the structure of the ribosome, the cell's protein factory, a task many colleagues considered impossible. In 1980 her group produced the first micro-crystals of ribosomal subunits, and over the next two decades she developed the techniques, including crystallography at very low temperatures, that made it possible to resolve them. From 1986 to 2004 she also headed a Max Planck research unit in Hamburg, and from 1989 she directed the Weizmann Institute's Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly. In 2000 and 2001 her group published complete structures of both subunits of a bacterial ribosome, work that went on to show how more than twenty antibiotics act on it.
She received the Israel Prize in 2002, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2006 and the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2008. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, becoming the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first woman to win the chemistry prize since 1964. She died in Israel on 31 August 2026, aged eighty-seven.
"Her parents, Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, emigrated from Zduńska Wola, Poland, to Mandatory Palestine in 1933."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Zduńska Wola, Kalisz Governorate, Congress Poland (both parents) (now Poland)
Her parents, Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, came to Jerusalem in 1933 from Zduńska Wola, a town that until the First World War lay in the Kalisz Governorate of Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire; one source gives Łódź. Their own birth years are not recorded.
First Israeli woman to win Nobel.
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Zduńska Wola, Kalisz Governorate, Congress Poland (both parents) (now Poland). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.