History of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was Ahad Ha-Am, the distinguished Zionist philosopher. Ahad Ha-Am was able to recruit Wissotsky’s son David to the Technikum plan, and a first contribution of 100,000 rubles was made. In 1908, the American philanthropist Jacob Schiff was visiting the "holy land". Schiff was affected by the poverty and destitution he found among many of the Jews of Palestine and was inspired by the idea of an institution that would provide technical training. Back in Europe, interest in the new Technikum was kept high. In 1909 Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who would later become President of the State of Israel, reported to
Chaim Weizmann Nobel Prize laureate Fritz Haber, but took over the directorship himself after Haber's death en route to Palestine. During World War II, he was an honorary adviser to the British Ministry of Supply and did research on synthetic rubber and high-octane gasoline. After the Second World War, a Jewish group called Nakam formulated several plans to kill Germans in revenge for the Holocaust. Nakam's leader Abba Kovner, a former Lithuanian partisan, testified that he had approached Weizmann (at that time, President of the World Zionist Organization) with plans for a mass poisoning and that Wiezmann had put him in touch