Branover German Hertzevich (1931)

Branover (Branower) German Hertzevich (b. 1931, Riga) – physicist and public figure. Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (1969), Professor (1970).

German Branover graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1953 and the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Latvia in 1959. From 1959 to 1971, he was a senior researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Latvian Academy of Sciences.

Branover is one of the founders of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) of liquid metals. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was an active participant in the Jewish national movement in Riga.

In 1972, German Branover moved to Israel. From 1973 to 1975, he was a professor at Tel Aviv University, and from 1973 onwards, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva, where he also became director of the MHD Research Centre. Starting from 1991, he also headed the joint Israel–Russia Laboratory for Energy Research.

German Branover developed and described theories and practical applications of liquid metal flows in magnetic fields, including studies on anisotropic MHD turbulence and its role in geophysics, astrophysics, and engineering. His major scientific works include: Turbulent MHD Flows in Pipes (1967), Magnetohydrodynamics of Incompressible Media (1970), MHD Flows in Channels (1978), Single- and Multiphase Flows in Electromagnetic Fields (1985), and Metallurgy, Energy Conversion, and MHD Flows (1993).

In 1960, German Branover started exploring the harmony between Torah and modern natural sciences in the spirit of the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He began translating Jewish religious texts into Russian, with later publications in Israel including From the Depths (1970), Excerpts from a Brief Compendium of Jewish Laws (1973), and Return (1977). His later works – The Eye of the Heart (1989), Synthesis (1990), Great Are Your Deeds (1993), and Science in the Light of the Torah – further developed these themes.

Starting from 1972, he chaired the Union of Jewish Religious Intellectuals from the USSR in Israel and served as editor-in-chief of the Shamir publishing house, the largest publisher of Judaica in Russian. In 1982, he founded the journal In the Light of the Torah in English and Hebrew. In 1993, at the request of the Prime Minister of Israel, he developed a comprehensive employment plan for immigrants from the USSR.

German Branover was awarded the Knesset Chairman’s Prize in 1992. He is a member of the International Moscow Energy Club (since 1991), a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (1992), the Latvian Academy of Sciences (1992), and an honorary Doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993).