Boris Valentinovich Volynov was the first Jew in space. He was born in Irkutsk in Siberia to a Jewish mother, but then his family relocated, and he finished secondary school in Prokopyevsk, Kemerovo Oblast, in 1952. The next year he completed basic pilot training in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, and in 1955 graduated from an aviation school in Novosibirsk. From September 1961 to January 1968 he studied at the faculty of engineering of the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy and graduated with a diploma of a pilot-engineer-cosmonaut.

Because of his mother’s Jewish background, his selection for space missions was hindered. Scheduled to fly in 1964, Soviet command pulled him off the mission when they found that that Volynov was Jewish. But in 1969 he was finally selected as commander of the Soyuz 5.

In 1980 he received his Ph.D. from the Zhukovsky Academy. After resigning from the space program in 1982, he spent eight years as a senior administrator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. After 30 years of service in Star City, in 1990, he retired as a colonel.

Judith Arlene Resnik was born in 1949 to Sara and Marvin, an optometrist, in Akron, Ohio. Both her parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Judith’s brother Charles was born four years later. She attended Hebrew school. A graduate of Firestone High School in 1966, she excelled in mathematics and played classical piano. While at Firestone she achieved a perfect SAT score, the sole female to do so that year. She received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, the year she married fellow student Michael Oldak. They divorced in 1974. In 1977 Resnik earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. Upon graduation from Carnegie Mellon, she was employed at RCA as a design engineer, and later worked with various NASA projects contracted to the company. While working toward her doctorate, Resnik was affiliated with the National Institutes of Health as a biomedical engineer. Later, she was a systems engineer with Xerox Corporation.

Resnik was recruited into the astronaut program January 1978 by Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols, who was working as a recruiter for NASA. Resnik’s first space flight was as a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of Discovery, from August to September 1984. She was likewise a mission specialist aboard Challenger for STS-51-L and died when it exploded on January 28, 1986. Resnik was the first American Jewish astronaut to go into space.

Jeffrey Alan Hoffman is an American former NASA astronaut and currently a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Hoffman made five flights as a space shuttle astronaut, including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, when the orbiting telescope’s flawed optical system was corrected. Trained as an astrophysicist, he also flew on 1990 Spacelab shuttle mission that featured the ASTRO-1 ultraviolet astronomical observatory in the shuttle’s payload bay. Over the course of his five missions he logged more than 1,211 hours and 21.5 million miles in space.

Hoffman was born November 2, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York, but considers Scarsdale, New York, to be his hometown. He graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1962, then received a Bachelor of Arts degree in astronomy (graduated summa cum laude) from Amherst College in 1966, a Master’s Degree in materials science from Rice University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Harvard University in 1971. Hoffman is an Eagle Scout.

As of 2005 he is currently co-director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium and a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

Hoffman made his fourth flight as an EVA crewmember on STS-61, December 2–13, 1993, on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. During this flight, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was captured, serviced, and restored to full capacity through a record five space walks by four astronauts, including Hoffman. While in space, during the holiday of Chanukah, he spun a dreidel to a live audience via satellite watching what’s known as Chanukah Live.

David Alexander Wolf is an American astronaut, medical doctor, and electrical engineer. Wolf has been to space four times. Three of his spaceflights were short-duration Space Shuttle missions, the first of which was STS-58 in 1993, and his most recent spaceflight was STS-127 in 2009. Wolf also took part in a long-duration mission aboard the Russian space station Mir which lasted 128 days. He was brought to Mir aboard STS-86 in September 1997, and landed aboard STS-89 in January 1998. In total Wolf has logged more than 4,040 hours in space. He is also a veteran of seven spacewalks totaling 41hrs. 17 min. in both Russian and American spacesuits.

David A. Wolf was born August 23, 1956 and graduated from North Central High School. Wolf then went on to earn a degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University. In 1982, he earned a medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine. He subsequently trained as a flight surgeon with the United States Air Force. Wolf joined the staff of Johnson Space Center in 1983 and investigated the physiological effects of microgravity.

With a number of shuttle flights and a four-month layover at the Russian space station Mir under his belt, Jewish astronaut David Wolf says that his first spacewalk was a religious experience. Other religious experiences he’s had in space? Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Chanuka, for which he brought a menorah that he couldn’t light due to fire hazards, and a dreidel. “I probably have the record dreidel spin,” he later said, “it went for about an hour and a half until I lost it. It showed up a few weeks later in an air filter. I figure it went about 25,000 miles.”

Gregory Errol Chamitoff was born August 6, 1962 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada to a Jewish family of Russian origin. Selected by NASA for the Astronaut Class of 1998, Chamitoff qualified for flight assignment as a Mission Specialist in 2000. Since then, Chamitoff has worked in the Space Station Robotics branch, been the lead CAPCOM for ISS Expedition 9, acted as Crew Support Astronaut for ISS Expedition 6, and helped develop onboard procedures and displays for Space Station system operations. Chamitoff served on a long duration mission to the International Space Station. He launched as a Mission Specialist on board Space Shuttle mission STS-124. He was Flight Engineer 2 and Science Officer on Expedition 17. He returned home as a Mission Specialist on STS-126, completing a tour that lasted six months. He was assigned to Expedition 17 and flew to the International Space Station on STS-124 on May 31, 2008. He was in space 198 days, joining Expedition 18 after Expedition 17 left the station, and returned to Earth in November of 2008 on STS-126. Chamitoff served as a mission specialist on the STS-134 mission, which was the last flight of Endeavour.

Dr Chamitoff is currently the Lawrence Hargrave Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is also Professor of Engineering Practice in Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University.

As a sign of his faith, he took mezuzot shaped like rockets on to the International Space Station and placed them on the door post near his bunk bed.

Ilan Ramon (June 20, 1954 – February 1, 2003) was an Israeli fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, and later the first Israeli astronaut. Ramon was the space shuttle payload specialist of STS-107, the fatal mission of Columbia, in which he and six other crew members were killed in a re-entry accident. At 48, he was the oldest member of the crew. Ramon is the only foreign recipient of the United States Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

Ramon was born in Ramat Gan, Israel, to Tonya (1929-2003) and Eliezer Wolferman (1923-2006). He grew up in Beersheba. His father was from Germany and fled Nazi persecution in 1935. His mother and grandmother were from Poland and were Holocaust survivors, having been in Auschwitz. They immigrated to Israel in 1949. His first name, Ilan, means “tree” in Hebrew. Ilan changed his last name from Wolferman when he joined the IAF just as many other Israeli aviators did.

Ramon graduated from high school in 1972. In 1987, he graduated with a B.Sc. degree in electronics and computer engineering from Tel Aviv University. In 1974, he graduated as a fighter pilot from the Israel Air Force (IAF) Flight School. In 1981 he was the youngest pilot taking part in Operation Opera, Israel’s strike against Iraq’s unfinished Osiraq nuclear reactor.

After attending the Tel Aviv University, he served as a deputy squadron commander. In 1994, he was promoted to the rank of Colonel and assigned as Head of the Department of Operational Requirement for Weapon Development and Acquisition. He stayed at this post until 1998. Ramon accumulated over 3,000 flight hours on the A-4, Mirage III-C, and F-4, and over 1,000 flight hours on the F-16.

In 1997, Ramon was selected as a Payload Specialist. He was designated to train as prime for a space shuttle mission with a payload that included a multispectral camera for recording desertaerosol (dust). In July 1998, he reported for training at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, where he trained until 2003. He flew aboard STS-107, logging 15 days, 22 hours and 20 minutes in space.

Although considered a secular Jew, Ramon reportedly sought to follow Jewish observances while in orbit. In an interview he said, “I feel I am representing all Jews and all Israelis.” He was the first spaceflight participant to request kosher food. He reportedly sought advice from a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, Zvi Konikov, about how to observe the Jewish Sabbath in space, as the period between sunrises in orbit is approximately 90 minutes. This was referenced by the words “Jerusalem we have a problem” in Rabbi Konikov’s speech at the Kennedy Space Center Memorial for Columbia on February 7, 2003.

The STS-107 mission ended abruptly when Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed and its crew perished during re-entry.

Aboard STS-107, Ramon carried a pencil sketch, “Moon Landscape”, drawn by 16-year-old Petr Ginz, who died in Auschwitz. Ramon also took with him a microfiche copy of the Torah given to him by Israeli president Moshe Katsav and a miniature Torah scroll (from the Holocaust) that was given him by Prof. Yehoyachin Yosef, a Bergen-Belsen survivor. Ramon asked the 1939 Club, a Holocaust survivor organization in Los Angeles, for a symbol of the Holocaust to take into outer space with him. A barbed wire mezuzah by the San Francisco artist Aimee Golant was selected. Ramon also took with him a dollar of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.

Gary Reisman was born October 2, 1968, in Parsippany, N.J. He earned a B.Sc. in economics at Wharton and in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991; a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Cal Tech, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. After that he worked at TRW as a guidance, navigation and control engineer, where he helped design unmanned spacecraft for NASA.

He was the first Jewish astronauat to man the International Space Station, where he spend many months doing experiments, spacewalks to install robotic equipment and training new replacements. On board was a memento he had brought with him from Ilan Ramon’s widow.

By Phil Siers and combined services