On April 18, 1974, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov reported to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that his agency, together with the Academy of Sciences and the State Committee of the USSR Council of Ministers, was preparing to thwart a “provocative action” by Zionists. By “provocation,” he meant an international scientific seminar planned for early July 1974, organized by a group of prominent Soviet scientists who had been denied permission to emigrate to Israel.
According to the KGB chief, one of the main organizers of this “provocation” was the unemployed “Jewish nationalist” Mark Yakovlevich Azbel—in reality, a respected scientist in the global academic community, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and former head of department at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Andropov claimed that Azbel, along with his associates Alexander Voronel, Viktor Brailovsky, and Alexander Lunts, aimed to draw international attention to the Jewish issue in the USSR through the seminar. Their appeal, sent to England and titled “To Scientists and Scientific Societies,” called on Western academics to participate in the event, thereby supporting Soviet refusenik scientists, who were in a dire situation. Jews were not allowed to emigrate to their historical homeland, while living and working normally within the USSR was also made impossible.
According to Mark Yakovlevich himself, he did not know a single word of Hebrew until he turned forty. It turned out that his surname, Azbel, derived from the male name Ashbel and is mentioned in the Torah. The Azbel family was Jewish but observed few traditions. His father, Yakov Aronovich Azbel, born into a humble family in the town of Novgorod-Seversky in the Chernigov province, moved to Kharkiv in 1925, where he graduated from medical school as a radiologist—managing to study well during the day while working hard in the evenings. Mark’s mother, Cecilia Isaevna Slobodkina, was born in Poltava into an educated family—her father managed a factory. After graduating from the Kharkiv Medical Institute in 1931, she married Yakov Azbel. A year later, on May 12, 1932, the young doctors welcomed their son Mark.
From an early age, Mark Azbel encountered antisemitism. Children in his native Kharkiv courtyard, after losing yet another game of “candy wrappers” to him, would call him a “kike.” Many adults weren’t much better than the younger generation. Once, when he went with his mother to register for kindergarten, the boy clearly overheard two teachers talking: “Another kike! Where do they all come from?!”
Like many Jewish children of his generation, Mark tried his hardest to prove that he was no worse than the “regular” kids. His tool was knowledge, which he acquired at an unusually fast pace. By the time he entered first grade, he could already read, write, and do arithmetic well, and quickly grew bored in school. In just the first term, he passed exams to be promoted to the second grade.
The Soviet-German war, which began on June 22, 1941, found the Azbel family in Novgorod-Seversky, where the young couple had gone on vacation. Nine-year-old Mark was visiting his father’s hometown for the first time in his life, as his parents had always worked hard and were finally able to take a proper break. But the trip didn’t last long—after hearing on the radio that the Nazis had attacked the Soviet border, the family immediately returned to Kharkiv.
However, by early autumn of 1941, Mark was evacuated to Siberia along with his mother, her sister Fanya, two cousins—Vitya and Yura—and several more distant relatives. The refugees settled in the village of Krivoshchekovo near Novosibirsk. Cecilia Isaevna began working in a military hospital, and Mark enrolled in the local school.
There was no news of his father until July 1942—when one summer day he unexpectedly appeared on their doorstep. Yakov Aronovich had lost a lot of weight but was alive and well. It turned out that he had escaped from Kharkiv, where, as a captain in the medical service, he had fled under heavy German bombing. In the end, the elder Azbel managed to survive and, by a lucky coincidence, ended up in Novosibirsk—where his evacuation hospital had been transferred.
The family immediately moved to join Yakov Aronovich in the regional center. Despite their dire financial situation, the Azbels did their best to provide their son with a good education. For Mark, classical music lessons came from radio broadcasts, and his English and German tutors were neighbors in their communal apartment. The boy not only picked up mathematics with ease but also devoured books and even tried writing poetry himself.
One day, a friend told him that a local store was selling microscopes—unsold stock from a factory that had shifted to wartime production—and Mark became obsessed with the idea of owning one. The dream had a specific price: 195 Soviet rubles, the exact cost of the microscope. For several months, he secretly saved his lunches and dried bread crusts, which were considered valuable commodities in those hungry times and could be traded on the local market. Eventually, he managed to buy the microscope. Naturally, his parents were furious when they found out how he had gotten the money, but the deed was already done.
From then on, Mark spent hours peering through the lenses at insects, drops of oil, and anything else he could place under the glass—his scientific curiosity already knew no bounds.
At the same time, the young Azbel began to notice things about the Soviet government’s treatment of its citizens that seemed inexplicable from a child’s point of view. One day, his German tutor, an ethnic German woman, suddenly disappeared without a trace. In class, they sang praises to Pavlik Morozov—the iconic pioneer hero who, in reality, had been a snitch and a traitor. It was this inconsistency that Mark, with his inquisitive mind, asked his mother about. Her reaction was both intense and predictable: “Listen, Mara, never ask questions about Pavlik Morozov at school or anywhere else. Don’t say anything about him at all. Keep your thoughts to yourself, or your father and I could get into serious trouble.” The fact was, Cecilia Isaevna had come from a bourgeois family and carefully concealed her background—and her son’s loose tongue could endanger them.
In 1944, together with the hospital where Mark’s parents were serving, the Azbels returned to Kharkiv, which had been liberated from the Nazis. The family barely recognized the city: entire streets had vanished, and their former apartment building on Kaplunovskaya Street was now occupied by NKVD families. After much difficulty, they managed to find another apartment in a half-ruined building and began a very modest postwar life. Things eased up somewhat when Mark’s father defended his PhD thesis and began working as deputy director at a research institute for prosthetics.
When Mark moved up to the eighth grade at Kharkiv School No. 36, he once again found himself far ahead of his classmates. These were children who, unlike the younger Azbel, had not been able to study during the occupation, and the class was considered very weak. Without much hesitation, the teenager began preparing on his own to take the exams for the ninth grade externally. The battle for the right to do so ended in the office of the head of the local education department (RONO), who, after carefully listening to the young prodigy, gave him the green light.
Mark’s new class was unlike any he had been in before. It was full of brilliant students, including future prominent figures such as biophysicist Maleev and mathematician Lyubich. The young man had finally found himself in an environment that matched his boundless thirst for knowledge. It was around this time, too, that—with little effort or preparation—he won the regional mathematics olympiad.
These years marked the formation of Azbel not only as a future scientist but also as a person with a distinct civic stance. While studying Marxism-Leninism in history class, the young man, who was passionate about the exact sciences, quickly realized that Engels had no real understanding of physics, even though he frequently referred to it. And when Lenin criticized the philosophies of Ostwald and Mach, young Azbel saw it as a clear sign of his utter incompetence. Lenin, in Mark’s view, was also strikingly inconsistent: at first, he wrote that the class demands of the proletariat were identical across all countries, making the idea of national self-determination outdated. But when the revolution and unrest began on the fringes of multiethnic Russia, Lenin suddenly proclaimed that the proletariat supported the struggle of nations for self-determination. Mark couldn’t accept such a complete about-face. It became clear to him that the communist system being promoted was fundamentally dishonest.
In 1948, at the age of 16, Mark Azbel graduated from school and was admitted to Kharkiv State University without entrance exams, as a winner of the regional mathematics olympiad. That same year brought him another great joy: the establishment of an independent Jewish state. In honor of the event, the young man wrote several flowery poems that quickly made the rounds. Despite their rebellious content, none of Mark’s friends—Jewish, Ukrainian, or Russian—ever reported him.
By the time he entered university, Mark had firmly decided to devote himself to physics. In the 10th grade, he happened to come across Henry Smyth’s report “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes” and immediately translated it from English. The young man became so fascinated by nuclear physics that he not only began studying the topic of isotope separation but also wrote a report on the subject. Soon, Azbel’s manuscript on electrochemical isotope separation was submitted to the Bureau of Inventions. However, the response was nothing more than a formal rejection.
But the young man didn’t give up and tried again—this time as a student at Kharkiv State University. He presented his idea for isotope separation to the dean of the Physics and Mathematics Department, Professor Milner. Eventually, the persistent freshman found himself in the office of the renowned Soviet physicist Ilya Lifshitz. Lifshitz delivered an almost immediate and disappointing verdict—the method wouldn’t work. He suggested that Azbel look for an explanation himself in the book Statistical Physics, which he co-authored with Lev Landau. Both Lifshitz and Landau would go on to play significant roles in the young scientist’s life.
In his second year at university, Azbel met a freshman named Alexander Voronel, who would become a lifelong friend. Voronel had already served time in prison for anti-Soviet activities before even entering university. He and Azbel quickly bonded. Their conversations weren’t limited to physics. The country was in the midst of a fierce campaign against “cosmopolitanism,” which affected many university professors and even Mark’s own family. His father, who had tried to defend colleagues being dismissed from their jobs, was soon fired himself. In November 1951, the family suffered another blow—Mark’s mother died during another severe asthma attack.
To his personal struggles were added social ones. All of Azbel’s student years were marked by slander against the Jewish population. At first, Jews were accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans” and hostile to the patriotic feelings of Soviet citizens. Later, they were accused of being part of a conspiracy against top government and party officials of the Soviet Union.
In January 1953, while riding a tram heading toward the university, student Mark Azbel witnessed a horrifying scene. As he later recalled, the entire tram car was spewing curses at the “vile murderers” who were allegedly preparing to destroy the Soviet system. As he was getting off the tram, Mark heard an angry voice lamenting that Hitler hadn’t managed to fully solve the Jewish question. “Well, never mind,” the stranger concluded, “it’s time for us to finish what he started.”
When Mark arrived at the university, he immediately saw the cause of the hysteria displayed on the bulletin board: in the central newspaper Pravda, an anonymous author had published an article titled “Vile Spies and Murderers Disguised as Professors and Doctors.”
After Stalin’s death, the wave of antisemitism subsided, but “fifth-point invalids” (a slang term for Jews, referring to the ethnicity line in Soviet personal records) still faced employment discrimination—though less overt than in previous years. Yet sometimes this worked unexpectedly in their favor. After graduating from university, Azbel was assigned to the Uralmash plant in Sverdlovsk—an appointment that would have meant the end of any scientific career. However, the plant’s vigilant leadership refused to accept a Jew. A small enterprise in Kamchatka turned him down as well. In the end, he became one of the few graduates granted a “free diploma”—the right to choose his own place of employment.
Thus, the newly minted graduate remained in his native Kharkiv and found part-time teaching jobs at several institutions: an evening school, a women’s school, and the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute. Azbel was deeply frustrated by the Soviet educational system: teachers trembling for their jobs, tyrannical principals, and meddling officials from the education departments. His freedom-loving nature didn’t allow him to stay silent. At faculty meetings, the young specialist openly stood up to the administration. The result: he was forcibly dismissed from one of his positions.
His scientific career, however, was progressing far more successfully. Together with his friend and colleague Emanuel Kaner, the 23-year-old Azbel predicted cyclotron resonance in metals and developed its theoretical model. In 1955, under the supervision of Ilya Lifshitz, the young physicist defended his PhD dissertation and began working at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology. At the defense, Lev Landau remarked: “The candidate has only one flaw, but he will outgrow it without our help. That flaw is youth.”
In the early 1960s, Azbel received an offer to move to Moscow—the center of Soviet science. In 1964, he began working at Moscow State University and at the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences, while also finding time to attend seminars at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, near Moscow. Even earlier, he had been invited to work in Moscow by Igor Kurchatov himself, but upon learning that the work would involve military research, Mark Yakovlevich politely declined. He did not want to help the Soviet government build weapons. Later, Azbel would call that decision one of the smartest of his life.
At his doctoral defense in 1958, the entire elite of Soviet science was present. The topic: “Theory of High-Frequency Conductivity of Metals in a Constant Magnetic Field.” The dissertation committee, headed by Pyotr Kapitsa, voted in favor of awarding Azbel the degree.
The celebration of his successful defense was combined with his wedding. Shortly before the defense, Azbel had met Naia Shteinman, a German language teacher at a Moscow technical college. Two weeks after they met, the young couple officially married.
In the early 1960s in Moscow, Azbel predicted a dramatic change in the behavior of electrons in metals in response to an infinitesimally small change in the magnetic field. Together with colleagues, he discovered the anomalous penetration of high-frequency electromagnetic fields into metals. In his work on superconductivity, he predicted the existence of quantum oscillations and resonances. Thirteen years later, American physicist Douglas Hofstadter took the next step and showed that in this case, the spectrum has a fractal structure—now known as the Hofstadter butterfly. Today, the problem of the singular spectrum is referred to in modern physics literature as the Azbel–Hofstadter model.
While actively pursuing his research, the young scientist also gave lectures at Moscow seminars on quantum physics and published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics and other scientific journals, including international ones. Azbel’s impeccable academic career was abruptly interrupted in 1965 by the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. An avid reader and friend of Daniel—one of the defendants—Mark Yakovlevich was summoned for interrogation. Toward the end of the investigation, Azbel and Daniel were brought face to face. The physicist conducted himself with dignity before the KGB officers and firmly denied any involvement in his friend’s underground literary activity.
Nevertheless, Azbel’s involvement in the Sinyavsky-Daniel case resurfaced during preparations for awarding the Lenin Prize, which, according to the entire scientific community, he was expected to receive. At the very last moment—right before the plenary session of the Lenin Prize Committee—Academy of Sciences President Mstislav Keldysh received a denunciation, and the prize was denied to the physicist. Still, his outstanding work couldn’t be completely ignored: in 1966 and 1968, the bureaucratic machine was forced to award him two lower-ranking prizes—Lomonosov Prizes.
The Thaw of the late 1950s, as expected, proved to be a temporary phenomenon. Mark Yakovlevich, pleased that he had chosen physics over the humanities—despite having a strong aptitude for both—felt that physics in the USSR remained a relatively free domain, one that was largely left alone by party officials who didn’t understand it anyway.
In 1967, Azbel married for the second time—his wife was Lidia Varshavskaya, daughter of a prominent Soviet chemist and a devoted Communist. Her father had been one of the key developers behind the method of producing and industrializing sarin gas. When she first heard her husband’s heretical thoughts about the Soviet regime and its realities, Lidia Semyonovna was quite surprised. But the real turning point came later that same year, when her husband began spending nearly all his time by the radio, waiting for news from Israel.
While Soviet newspapers denounced the “Zionist aggressors” and gleefully speculated about the possible destruction of Israel, many Soviet Jews were tuning in to Kol Yisrael (The Voice of Israel) and other Western radio stations. When the news of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War reached the USSR, it sparked a profound inner transformation. For the first time in centuries, local Jews felt proud to be Jewish—proud to belong to a people capable of heroically defending their own country.
For the first time in his life, Professor Azbel began to consider that his time working in the Soviet Union was coming to an end. This realization came in the early 1970s. Not long before, Kol Yisrael had begun broadcasting astonishing reports: some Jews were publicly declaring their desire to leave the Soviet Union and move to their historic homeland, Israel. In the USSR, such declarations were viewed as acts of treason.
When the trial known as the “Leningrad Hijacking Case” began on December 15, 1970, the Jewish population began to politicize even more rapidly. Almost every day, people gathering in support of the defendants were arrested outside the Leningrad City Court. The sensational trial revealed the true level of desperation among activists in the Jewish movement. There were no legal means to exercise their right to repatriate, so breaking the law became their only option. The “Hijacking Case” also triggered an unprecedented wave of public statements by people openly demanding to be allowed to leave for their homeland.
Mark Yakovlevich could not remain on the sidelines. He made a decision: he would join his Jewish brothers and sisters, break out of the Soviet concentration camp, and contribute to the welfare of the Jewish state. Not even the birth of his second child—a daughter, Yulia—held him back. In December 1972, he submitted his application to emigrate to Israel, and under pressure from his supervisor, academician Isaak Khalatnikov, he was immediately forced to resign. Two weeks later, his first wife and their son Vadim also submitted emigration applications.
When Azbel traveled to Kharkiv shortly after submitting his application, he was struck by the transformation in people he once knew. Upon seeing him, former acquaintances would avert their eyes and cross to the other side of the street. “You have no idea what’s been going on here since your last visit,” one friend explained. “Some of us were summoned to the Big House [a colloquial term for the KGB headquarters] and questioned about you. We were warned that you are a dangerous Zionist, an agent of Israeli intelligence.” Friends also shared their suspicion that his neighbor, a chemical engineer, had slandered Azbel during a KGB interrogation—claiming he had always been a Zionist and was undoubtedly spying for the Jews and America.
While waiting for a response from the Soviet authorities, Mark Yakovlevich decided to support an initiative by his longtime friend Alexander Voronel, who had filed his own emigration request several months earlier. To maintain scientific engagement among the refuseniks, Voronel proposed organizing a seminar where participants could present papers and discuss new scientific ideas. Initially, only a handful of people attended these gatherings, but over time, the seminar began to draw more than twenty scientists on a regular basis. In the West, official structures were created to support the seminar: an “International Secretariat” and an “International Board of Sponsors and Referees.” In Moscow, a “Soviet Organizing Committee under the Auspices of Tel Aviv University” was formed, which included Azbel and 17 other Soviet refusenik scientists.
Another significant project Mark Yakovlevich worked on was the samizdat journal Jews in the USSR, the first publication of its kind to appear in the Soviet Union since the 1920s. Azbel was heavily involved in the journal’s production and was one of the leaders of the scientific seminar, but most of his time was occupied by providing consultations to people hoping to apply for an exit visa. At that time, the majority of Soviet citizens had no idea how to go about it: what the visa office would require of them; how to survive the waiting period if they were fired from their jobs; what prospects awaited them in Israel. They all sought guidance—especially from someone whose name was known and whose opinion was respected.
In helping repatriants, Mark Yakovlevich was in constant contact with Israel. The well-known Russian prose writer, poet, and playwright Vladimir Voinovich recalled how Azbel would come to his apartment and use his phone to transmit information about Soviet Jews preparing to emigrate. He would spend hours dictating coded messages over the line, such as: “He bought 4 lightbulbs of 23 watts” (meaning the person was leaving on April 23). Eventually, the authorities had enough and disconnected Voinovich’s phone. But the writer bore no grudge against Azbel—he was organizing something truly important.
Another area of Azbel’s activism was providing material support to refuseniks who had been stripped of their legal means of livelihood. Receiving foreign currency transfers from abroad or selling rare and highly sought-after items like American jeans, cameras, or Japanese tape recorders, activists did what they could to support people living in limbo. Naturally, this didn’t go unnoticed by the police and the KGB. For years, officers in uniform regularly appeared at the Azbels’ door, their conversations at home were bugged, and Mark Yakovlevich remained under close surveillance most of the time. It became a routine part of life for the scientist.
In April 1973, Azbel’s former wife and son were allowed to emigrate to Israel. This sparked hope that his own repatriation request might also be granted. However, shortly after Naia Shteinman and Vadim’s departure, Mark Yakovlevich received a letter in the mail that could only mean one thing—his application had been denied. At the OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration), his fears were confirmed. When he asked for the reason, the official coldly replied: “The state considers it undesirable for you to leave the country.”
The first thing Azbel did after his emigration was denied was write a letter to Nature, one of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious scientific journals, calling on scientists around the world to support Soviet Jewish scholars in their struggle. Nature and several other professional journals responded and became invaluable allies to the Soviet refuseniks.
Jewish scientists decided to confront the Kremlin head-on, declaring publicly that they were prepared to fight for their rights and freedoms. Azbel and his colleagues organized a protest hunger strike in a Moscow apartment, having first distributed a press release to international media about their bold action. As a result of the more than ten-day hunger strike—and the coverage it received in major global outlets—mathematician Anatoly Libgober and several other scientists were granted exit visas. This was a breakthrough: in the previous year, not a single scientist had been allowed to emigrate. The refuseniks felt they had accomplished their mission, and the outcome of their action exceeded expectations.
In 1974, after Alexander Voronel left for Israel, Azbel became chairman of the scientific seminar, which from then on was held in his apartment and took on an international character. The seminar was attended not only by local refuseniks but also by leading scientists from around the world, including numerous Nobel Prize laureates. This activity was accompanied by constant summonses from the police and the KGB, as well as military draft notices sent to Azbel as a reserve second lieutenant. Despite this pressure, Mark Yakovlevich continued his scientific research. In the latter half of the 1970s, he also began exploring a new field—physical studies of DNA.
After Azbel was expelled from the Institute of Theoretical Physics for submitting an emigration application, he was blacklisted and barred from working anywhere in the USSR. But help quickly came from Israel. One of the international phone calls Azbel received was from Professor Yuval Ne’eman, president of Tel Aviv University and one of the world’s most brilliant minds at the time. After learning about Azbel’s situation from an American colleague, Ne’eman offered him a professorship at Tel Aviv University. And beginning on January 1, 1973, Azbel—still a Soviet citizen—was officially on the faculty of one of Israel’s top universities. He gave his lectures to Israeli students over the phone.
In 1975, Azbel was similarly appointed as an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania—also in absentia.
Gradually, the authorities resumed allowing some people to leave: Dan Roginsky was granted an exit visa, followed by Moshe Gitterman. But after the Yom Kippur War, visa issuance was once again suspended. In March 1975, during the trial of Zionist prisoners Boris Tsitlenok and Mark Nashpitz, the KGB was outraged by the appeals Azbel had prepared and sent to American labor unions, Jewish communities, and the people of Israel. These appeals stated that the trial was a blatant attempt by the Soviet authorities to crush the Jewish people’s desire for freedom.
In February 1976, Mark Yakovlevich became one of six representatives of Soviet refuseniks who met with high-ranking officials at the reception office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). They spoke with Albert Ivanov, head of the Department of Administrative Organs of the Central Committee, and Vladimir Obidin, head of the All-Union OVIR. The Soviet bureaucrats boldly claimed that 98.4% of Jews who had applied to leave had already been allowed to do so—but gave no specific answers or commitments. The result of the meeting was predictable: the participants were once again denied permission to emigrate.
By 1977, the authorities had gone completely off the rails. On March 5, 1977, the newspaper Izvestia published an article by a refusenik named Sanya Lipavsky, later known as “Agent Ervin.” In the article, Lipavsky claimed he had withdrawn his emigration application and admitted to being a CIA informant. He also listed his “contacts,” among them Professor Mark Azbel. Lipavsky described events like Voronel’s seminars as part of a scheme “to fuel emigration from the USSR and undermine the foundations of Soviet power.”
Mark Yakovlevich was immediately reminded of the “Doctors’ Plot” and the possible consequences of such a publication. And indeed, soon after, closed-door party meetings began to be held across the country to condemn Soviet Zionists. Azbel’s friend, Veniamin Bogomolny, was beaten by a gang of thugs on a Moscow street. When a police officer tried to intervene, the attackers simply showed him their KGB credentials. Soon afterward, Azbel’s longtime ally Anatoly Sharansky was arrested.
What Mark Yakovlevich feared most was ending up in prison and leaving his manuscript—on the challenges of using physical methods to study DNA—unfinished. In addition, the professor wanted to complete work on the upcoming issue of the Jews in the USSR journal and had planned a short trip to Leningrad for this purpose. After that visit to the northern capital, pressure from the KGB intensified once again. Azbel was ordered to shut down the scientific seminar and provide incriminating testimony in the case against Sharansky. But despite all their efforts, the authorities failed to break the scientist’s resolve.
That’s when the Soviet government decided to simply get rid of one of its most active dissidents. After a series of interrogations at the KGB, Mark Yakovlevich received a postcard in the mail from OVIR. Expecting yet another rejection, he braced himself—but instead, the postcard contained an unexpected instruction: Azbel was to call a specific phone number. At the appointed time, he dialed the number from a public phone booth. On the other end, an OVIR official immediately said, “So, your problem is resolved.” He was so stunned he didn’t understand at first what she meant. “What do you mean?” he asked. The response was astonishing: “You are permitted to leave the Soviet Union.”
Professor Azbel barely remembered his final days in the USSR—it all felt like a blur. The departure itself, however, was unforgettable. Border control officers and plainclothes agents tried to block the refuseniks until the very last minute, and even the plane was delayed, supposedly due to bad weather. It seemed as if the authorities were hesitant, right up to the last moment, to actually let Azbel and his family go free. But at last, the long-awaited flight took off.
Upon arriving in Israel in the summer of 1977, Azbel immediately began teaching at Tel Aviv University. Just two months after his arrival, he departed for his first scientific trip to the United States.
A prominent specialist in electrodynamics, Azbel began to successfully explore a new field in Israel— the physics of disordered systems. He also showed interest in theoretical biology. In particular, he worked on a phenomenological theory of the evolution of mortality and conducted statistical analyses of the structure and physical properties of DNA. The number of articles Azbel published between 1977 and 1991 exceeds one hundred—an undeniably impressive achievement in the scientific world.
However, as the scientist later admitted, for many years, each time he stepped out of his apartment building in Ramat HaSharon, he would flinch when a passing car slowed down or stopped near him. For a brief moment, he felt as though he were still in the Soviet Union—and that men in gray suits were about to jump out of the vehicle.
While continuing his scientific work, Mark Yakovlevich remained deeply involved in public life. With the arrival of the Great Aliyah from the USSR, he did his best to support the new immigrants. However, he often clashed with some of them, as he had strict criteria for evaluating the scientific potential of repatriates. He was extremely demanding—both of himself and of others.
Mark Yakovlevich passed away on March 31, 2020. The distinguished scientist had received multiple offers to move to the United States—the epicenter of global science. But Azbel always had a firm answer: “I am a Zionist.” A proud son of Eretz Yisrael, he could not imagine himself apart from his people.
13.06.2022
Bibliography and Sources:
Personal archive of Mark Azbel, provided to the “Jewish Heroes” project by Irina Kolodna
S.A. Gredeskul, V.M. Kontorovich, L.A. Pastur, V.G. Peschansky, Yu.A. Freiman. About our colleague and friend: On the 90th anniversary of Mark Azbel’s birth // Seven Arts, No. 5(144), May 2022
Vladimir Kremer. The Arrested Seminar // Notes on Jewish History, No. 2(149), February 2012
Materials of the symposium “Jewish Culture in the USSR: Status. Prospects” (Moscow, 19–21.12.1976), 1976 – Archive of the Vaad of Russia, Moscow, f.1, op.1, d.19 // Project “J-Doc”; accessed September 4, 2023, https://jdoc.org.il/items/show/1879
Original memos, reports, and information (returned from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine), 2.10–3.12.1976 – SBU State Archive, f.16 (1124) // Project “J-Doc”; accessed September 4, 2023, https://jdoc.org.il/items/show/949
Materials from the Samizdat Archive (AS), document collection, 1975–1976 – Archive documents from the Research and Information Center “Memorial”, St. Petersburg // Project “J-Doc”; accessed September 4, 2023, https://jdoc.org.il/items/show/1122
Mark Azbel
1932 – 2020
