SHALHAV ZOHAR RADAR ASTRONOMER OBITUARY

On Saturday December 19, 2020 , Dr. Shalhav Zohar, age 93, passed away peacefully at his home in Pasadena surrounded by his loving family. Dr. Zohar was a noted Radar Astronomer at Caltechs’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was most widely known for breakthrough mapping Venus with colleague Richard Goldstein. Dr. Zohar was born in Tel Aviv in 1927 and was a Captain in the Israeli Army where he fought in the 1948 war for Israeli Independence. As a member of the Palmach, he volunteered to join the dangerous Babel el Wad convoys ferrying food and water to a starving and blockaded Jerusalem. He also helped evacuate young children from a dangerously isolated and vulnerable village on the Dead Sea in a small Cessna, dropping bombs by hand out of the plane to protect the plane with its precious cargo of children from being shot down. Dr. Zohar’s family on his father’s side (Abulafiah). traces it’s ancestry back 12 generations in Jerusalem. His maternal grandparents, Haim and Hava Tzoar were part of the First Aliyah to Israel and were early settlers of Petach Tikvah. After serving in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, Dr. Zohar received his BS in Electrical Engineering trom the Technion in Haifa, Israel, Thereafter he came to the United States to further pursue his studies and received his Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now NYU). His original Master’s Thesis can still be found for sale on line, (as a collector’s edition) He and his family moved to La Canada in 1962 when Dr..Zohar came to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In his leisure time Dr. Zohar loved to scuba dive and crafted jewlery from the shells of the abalones he frequently brought home to cook for dinner. He loved music and opera, particularly Verdi’s Aida. He loved music so much and wanted so badly to play that in the 60’s he he built an organ, a precursor to modern keyboards He was a true Rennaissance man who could be engaged in knowledgeable conversation on any topic, and frequently enjoyed inviting in door to door missionaries to engage in Biblical discourse. Dr. Zohar is survived by his loving wife of 71 years, Bracha Zohar, his high school sweetheart who has been a Hebrew Teacher at Sinai Akiba Academy in Beverly Hills and Verdugo Hills Hebrew Center among other synagogues, his daughters Oreet Zohar of Washington, DC and Pazit Zohar of San Francisco and his grandson, Ari Herman Zohar Kozlow of Charlotte, North Carolina. He will be laid to rest on Thursday December 24 at 2:00 at Mount Sinai at Forest Lawn Cemetery. He has gifted his brain to the UCLA Brain Bank. Contributions in his honor may be made to the American Technion Society, 55 E 59th Street NY NY 10022. www.ats.org/zohar