Museum Features Text In Exhibit Marking Israel's 60-Year Anniversary

Pages from a diary belonging to Space Shuttle Columbia astronaut Ilan Ramon will be shown for the first time as part of an exhibit of famous documents from Israel's history on display at the Israel Museum. Opening on Sunday, the exhibit is in honor of Israel's 60-year anniversary.

Ramon was Israel's first astronaut in space and one of the crew of seven who perished in Columbia's tragic break-up during re-entry. After plummeting to earth in a 37-mile free-fall, 37 pages of his diary were found two months later by post-crash searchers near Palestine, TX. NASA then returned the diary to Rona Ramon, wife of the fallen astronaut.

She enlisted The Israel Museum's forensics experts to restore the pages, which took about a year, Israel Museum curator Yigal Zalmona said. Scientists from the Israeli Police then worked another four years on the text, eventually deciphering about 80 percent of it, according to Associated Press reports.

"It's almost a miracle that it survived -- it's incredible," Zalmona said, adding that "no rational explanation" can explain its recovery, since most of the shuttle was destroyed. The pages from the diary were subjected to intense heat from the Shuttle explosion, extreme cold from the upper atmosphere, and "microorganisms and insects" in the field where it landed.

"We agreed to do the restoration completely respecting the family's privacy and the sensitivity about how intimate the document is," museum director James Snyder said. Ramon's wife did not wish to make most of the diary public, because of its personal nature.

The museum will show just two pages. One consists of Ramon's notes, and the other page is the Kiddush prayer, written in the diary so Ramon could read the Jewish blessing in a broadcast from the Shuttle to earth.

No knowledge of possible trouble with the Shuttle was indicated by other diary entries.

Other items of historical significance in the exhibit include Israel's 1948 declaration of independence, the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and a bloodstained sheet of paper with lyrics to a peace anthem, carried by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of his assassination in 1995, the AP said.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.english.imjnet.org.il