Yehuda Eisenberg was one of the founders of the department of nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute. Together with Gideon Yekutieli he established the first experimental particle physics laboratory in Israel at the Weizmann Institute.
Yehuda was born in Tel-Aviv in 1927. He studied physics at the Hebrew University and was one of the outstanding Israeli M.Sc. students that were sent to study nuclear physics abroad. After doing his Ph.D. at Cornell University he returned to Israel in 1953 and started to do research at Weizmann in particle physics.
In the first 10 years of the particle laboratory, he studied cosmic rays by using the nuclear emulsion method of photograph plates. In one of his experiments he saw an unexplained event. It turned out that this event looked like an important particle that was discovered later at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Omega minus , which was predicted by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman.
In the early 1960s the particle laboratory moved to the Bubble Chamber technique of pictures of particle interactions taken at high-energy accelerators in Europe and the U.S.A. Yehuda and Gideon built a big research group with advanced scanning and measuring equipment to study the particles produced in these interactions and the forces between them.
Since the end of the 1970s the leading technique became the use of electronic detectors in colliding beam experiments. Yehuda initiated the joining of the Weizmann group to the electron-positron colliding beam experiment TASSO at the PETRA accelerator in DESY, Hamburg, Germany. The most important result of TASSO was the discovery of the Gluon particle in 3-jet events.
In the early 1990s, under Yehuda's initiative with a strong support of the science minister Yuval Ne'eman, Israel became one of the leading states that contributed to the building of the electron-proton accelerator HERA at DESY. The group joined and took an active part in the ZEUS experiment that made important contributions to the understanding of the proton structure.
In 1980 Yehuda lost his son Dan in a tragic accident: He was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force and was teaching new soldiers to become pilots. In one flight something went wrong with the aircraft. Dan sent his student by a parachute which saved his life, but did not manage to jump out and lost his life.
Yehuda passed away in 2015 and was buried near his son in the Rehovot military cemetery. He was survived by his wife Shlomit and by a daughter and a son.