While J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Jew—and very aware of the fact—he received little Jewish education or exposure to religious practice. Other important Manhattan Project scientists, like Hans Bethe and Niels Bohr, had Jewish ancestors, but were raised as Christians. By contrast, the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi—whose research made possible the MRI machine, the microwave oven, and modern radar systems—stood out among his many Jewish collaborators at Los Alamos for his deeply religious upbringing. Avi Shafran writes:
Rabi was born in 1898 into an observant Orthodox Jewish family in Rymanów—what was then part of Austrian-ruled Galicia and is today part of Poland. At his circumcision, he received the name Yisrael Yitzchak. Soon thereafter, his family immigrated to the U.S., settling into a small apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side before moving to the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Rabi’s parents fully maintained and cherished their Orthodox Jewish observance, and the family spoke Yiddish exclusively.
“My early upbringing, so struck by God, the maker of the world, this has stayed with me,” he mused. “The idea of God,” he added, “helps you to have a greater feeling for the mystery of modern physics.” . . . Rabi considered physics as something that “transcended religion,” but didn’t replace it. Physics, he explained, “filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God.”
Rabi never returned to the Orthodox practice of his family and his youth. And yet, at the same time, he remained somehow conjoined with it. “Nothing in the world can move me as deeply as some of these Orthodox Jewish practices,” he confided.
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