Robert Wagner, 1877-1953
As a U.S. senator from New York from 1927 to 1949, Wagner was a prominent Christian Zionist. He introduced unsuccessful legislation in 1939 to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children from Germany. He co-wrote a congressional…
Raoul Wallenberg, 1912-1947
Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who in 1944 saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, including future Congressman Tom Lantos, by providing protective passports and safe houses. He went missing in January 1945 and is believed to…
Zerach Warhaftig, 1906-2002
Belarus-born Warhaftig persuaded Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara to issue 3,500 visas for Jews fleeing Lithuania at the start of World War II, then escaped to Canada via Japan. He reached the Land of Israel in…
Arieh Warshel, 1940-
With Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt, Warshel was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2013. His work in computational chemistry applied classical mechanics and quantum mechanics to predict and model chemical reactions. He studied…
Barbi Weinberg, 1929-
Weinberg is the founder and chairman emerita of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, fulfilling a vision she shared with her late husband, Larry, a former AIPAC president. In 1973 she became the first…
Avi Weiss, 1944-
Weiss is an author and activist who led the movement to free Soviet Jewry; ultimately, more than 1 million immigrants moved as the Soviet Union crumbled. He served as spy Jonathan Pollard’s personal rabbi and…
Yosef Weitz, 1890-1972
Born in Ukraine, Weitz moved to Palestine in 1908 and became a leader in efforts to acculturate immigrants through agricultural labor. He helped found the Galilee’s Yavniel moshav and Jerusalem’s Beit Hakerem neighborhood. Starting in…
Ezer Weizman, 1924-2005
Weizman, the nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was Israel’s seventh president from 1993 to 2000. He was a founder of the Israeli Air Force and became its commander in 1958. As defense minister in the first…
Chaim Weizmann, 1874-1952
Weizmann, a native of Russian-controlled Poland, was the first president of Israel. In England during World War I, he used his chemistry skills to develop a synthetic process for making acetone and thus made relationships…
Noa Wertheim, 1965-
A dancer and choreographer, Wertheim is the artistic director of Vertigo Dance Company, founded with partner Adi Shaal in Jerusalem in 1992. They added a dance school in 1997 and in 2007 established the Vertigo…
Harold Wilson, 1916-1995
Labor Party leader Wilson was the British prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976 and was one of Parliament’s strongest supporters of Israel, where he made social democratic friends. He spoke up…
Orde Wingate, 1903-1944
A British army officer, Wingate was sent to Palestine in 1936 to counter Arab violence against the British and Jews. A fundamentalist Christian who embraced the prophetic vision of a Jewish return to Israel, he…
Charles Winters, 1913-1984
A U.S. businessman who wasn’t Jewish, Winters bought three surplus U.S. B-17 bombers on the pretense that they were for his Caribbean transport service. Instead, he delivered them to the nascent Israeli Air Force in…
Stephen Wise, 1874-1949
A native of Hungary who immigrated to the United States as a toddler, Wise co-founded the New York Federation of Zionist Societies in 1897 and the Federation of Zionist Societies in 1898 and launched the…
David Wolffsohn, 1856-1914
Wolffsohn was born in Lithuania and became active in Zionist affairs as a businessman in Cologne, Germany. In 1893 he established the Cologne Association for the Development of Agriculture in the Land of Israel. He…
