Aluf Mishne Israeli Air Force
What they earned


Also kept at
salute.nw ↗ Aluf Mishne ยท Israeli Air ForceIn memory of
Ilan Ramon
1954 – 2003 Today would have been the birthday. A white rose is at the name.
Their life
Payload specialist, a colonel of the Israeli Air Force, and the first Israeli in space. He was born Ilan Wolfferman in Ramat Gan. His mother and his grandmother had survived Auschwitz.
He flew in the war of 1973 and was the youngest pilot on the raid that destroyed the Osirak reactor in 1981 - the eighth aircraft, the one with the least fuel to get home. He took a degree in electronics and computer engineering at Tel Aviv University and commanded a squadron.
He was not observant, but said that as the first Israeli in space he would represent all Jews and all Israelis, and so he ate kosher aboard and asked a rabbi how to keep the Sabbath at sixteen sunrises a day.
He carried with him a small pencil drawing called Moon Landscape - the Earth as it would look from the Moon - made by Petr Ginz, a boy of fourteen in Theresienstadt who was murdered at Auschwitz. He also carried a miniature Torah scroll that had been used at a secret bar mitzvah in Bergen-Belsen, and a dollar from the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
His diary survived the break-up and a fall of thirty-seven miles, and was restored over a year by the Israeli police forensic laboratory.
He is buried at Nahalal. His eldest son Assaf, a pilot of the Israeli Air Force, was killed in a training accident six years later and is buried beside him.
What is held of them
Died together
The crew of Columbia · 7 lost together
What people have said
Nobody has said anything for Ilan Ramon yet.