- December 21, 2025
- 7:41 am
- Israel, Ukraine
The establishment of the Mark Azbel Prize has been announced in Israel, aimed at supporting young researchers in the field of theoretical physics within the framework of Kharkiv National University.
Mark Yakovlevich Azbel
Mark Yakovlevich Azbel (1932 – 2020) was an outstanding physicist, a graduate of Kharkiv University, a dissident, and an organizer of scientists’ resistance to the Soviet totalitarian regime, and a professor at Tel Aviv University.
Irina Kolodnaya, the scientist’s widow, writes that the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter discussed with Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, Yevgeny Korniychuk, the details of her private initiative to establish a prize to commemorate her husband. In the first stage, Irina Kolodnaya is allocating $25,000 — $5,000 annually over five years — for the Mark Azbel Prize, whose laureates will be selected from among young physics researchers at Kharkiv National University.
“I am sure that Mark would have done exactly that — directed assistance to Kharkiv University, where he studied and began his scientific career, and which is now experiencing difficult times along with Kharkiv and all of Ukraine due to Russian aggression,” said Irina Kolodnaya.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, Yevgeny Korniychuk, emphasized at a meeting with Irina Kolodnaya:
“I sincerely thank you for this wonderful initiative. Any help to Ukraine is very much needed now. I am confident that Kharkiv will overcome all the difficulties of the war and remain a flagship of Ukrainian science. I hope that other patrons will follow your example, strengthening humanitarian, scientific, and human ties between Israel and Ukraine.”
The rector of KNU, Tatyana Kaganovskaya, and the University Academic Council fully supported the establishment of the Mark Azbel Prize.
Professor Ruslan Vovk, Dean of the Faculty of Physics at Kharkiv National University named after V.N. Karazin, noted in a conversation with UJE:
“Mark Azbel’s scientific discoveries were worthy of a Nobel Prize. The faculty remembers Azbel and values his contribution to the development of science, so we decided to name one of the auditoriums after him alongside the Department of Theoretical Physics. The establishment of the Azbel Prize will help young scientists engage in promising research within our University.”
The dates considered for the award ceremony are May 12-14 — Mark Azbel’s birthday and Israel’s Independence Day.
One of the best periods in Mark Azbel’s life is associated with the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv
One of the best periods in Mark Azbel’s life is associated with the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv — his passion for physics, his first scientific successes, and academic recognition.
Mark was born into a family of doctors; his father and mother graduated from Kharkiv Medical Institute before the war. The Azbel family returned from evacuation to Kharkiv, where Mark attended school No. 36. In 1948, Mark entered Kharkiv State University and took up physics. He graduated from the University in 1953, taught mathematics at an evening school in Kharkiv, while simultaneously engaging in scientific research.
In Kharkiv, 23-year-old Azbel predicted cyclotron resonance in metals (Azbel-Kaner resonance). In 1955, under the guidance of Professor and future academician Ilya Lifshitz, he defended his candidate dissertation at the age of 25 and began working at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology.
The great physicist and future Nobel laureate, academician Lev Landau, said during the defense of 27-year-old Azbel’s doctoral dissertation: “The only drawback of the dissertation is youth.”
The scientist refused offers to engage in the creation of new types of Soviet nuclear weapons. He became the head of the Department of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow), but in 1972 he applied for an exit from the USSR and was immediately dismissed from all positions. He was denied exit.
Azbel did not reconcile with the arbitrariness of the Soviet authorities and began to fight against the regime. For the first time in the USSR, he created a permanent international scientific seminar for scientists who were denied exit.
In April 1974, KGB head Yuri Andropov reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU about plans to disrupt Mark Azbel’s initiative — a “provocative action by Zionists,” as the KGB called the international scientific seminar. The “subversive event” of Azbel involved not only Soviet scientists who were denied exit but also outstanding scientists from around the world, including five Nobel Prize laureates in physics.
Since 1973, he lectured by phone on physics for students of Tel Aviv University.
In 1977, the KGB could no longer withstand the scientist’s resilience and allowed his exit. Mark Azbel received a chair in theoretical physics at Tel Aviv University. He was a laureate of the Israeli Landau Prize (1989) and the German Meitner-Humboldt Prize (2001) for outstanding achievements in solid-state physics.
The establishment of the Azbel Prize can be seen alongside the assistance provided by Nobel laureate in chemistry Professor Roald Hoffmann to his native city of Zolochiv in Ukraine. Saved by a Ukrainian family during the Holocaust, Hoffmann responds to Ukraine with kindness. Azbel, who overcame all the difficulties of Soviet anti-Semitism, returns to the city and University of his youth — as a reward and support for young scientists.
In one of his interviews in Israel, Professor Mark Azbel said:
“Even at sixteen, when I was finishing school [in Kharkiv], I firmly knew that I hated this system, the party, the government, the leader. And, having received an invitation to work with Kurchatov [in Moscow], I decided: I do not want to give such power what they shoot with. It was one of the reasonable actions I took in my life.”
