The Central Indian Post office has issued a postage stamp bearing the photograph of Prof. Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, the famed Jewish scientist and philanthropist whose discoveries included a vaccine against cholera and the bubonic plague.
Prof. Haffkine, a native of Odessa, Russia, joined the staff of the Pasteur Institute in 1889. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Indian in 1893, he went there at the request of the British Government and his vaccine and methods of inoculation greatly reduced the disease’s mortality rate. He returned to India in 1890 to help overcome a bubonic plague epidemic.
Known to the Indians as “the white magician,” Prof. Haffkine established the Haffkine Institute in Bombay. He left India in 1915 and became an Orthodox Jew and set up a fund to aid the yeshivas of Eastern Europe. He died in 1930 at the age of 70.
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