Ramon, 48, was an air force colonel and the son of a Holocaust survivor. His military career included the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
He became a national hero overnight as newspapers featured him on the front page, and Israel television stations carried live broadcasts of the Jan. 16 liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Ramon's 79-year-old father, Eliezer Wolferman, was interviewed live in Jerusalem on Channel Two shortly before the scheduled landing Saturday.
"I last spoke to (Ramon) via a video conference when I was still in Houston,'' the smiling, silver-haired Wolferman said. ``It was very emotional. Our family saw him, and the children asked their dad to do somersaults in the air.''
Wolferman went on to say, ``We write via e-mail ...''
At that moment, the interviewer cut him off. ``OK, we will talk about that later. There is a news flash.''
The station broke away to its correspondent in Florida, who explained that the ground controllers had lost contact with the shuttle. When the broadcast returned to the Jerusalem studio, the station explained that Wolferman had been taken away.
A couple of hours later, he spoke again to the media, saying, ``I think of everything from the day he was born until now,'' he said, ``I have no son, it is very sad and I don't know what else to say.''
Ramon's brother Gadi, a restaurant owner, said he had invited a large group of friends ``to toast the landing. Even in our wildest imaginations it didn't occur to us that something could happen.''
"I'm scared of flying,'' Ramon said, but his astronaut brother said that ``driving on the road is more dangerous than flying.''
Ramon's wife, Rona, and their four children, who have been living in Texas for several years as Ramon prepared for the flight, were at Cape Canaveral for the landing. NASA took the astronauts' families to a secluded place.
Ramon was selected in 1997 to be a payload specialist. He spent much of Columbia's 16-day flight aiming cameras in an Israel Space Agency study of how desert dust and other contaminants in Earth's atmosphere affect rainfall and temperature.
For a few days, Ramon's journey, along with six American crewmates, diverted attention from the grinding conflict with the Palestinians, which has seen 28 months of nonstop fighting.
The Israeli enthusiasm came partly from the fact that Ramon is one of the country's top air force pilots, considered among the nation's military elite.
Ramon was not particularly religious but decided to eat kosher food in orbit.
"I'm secular in my background, but I'm going to respect all kinds of Jews all over the world,'' Ramon said before his flight.
Ramon has logged thousands of hours of flight time and was part of the first Israeli squad to pilot American-made F-16 fighter jets in 1980. He fought in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and in the 1982 war in Lebanon.
Ramon was one of the fighter pilots who destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, a senior Israeli government official said last month on condition of anonymity.
The attack, in which eight F-16 warplanes obliterated the French-built Osirak reactor near Baghdad, was a milestone for Israeli aviation because the planes flew over enemy Arab territory for hours without detection. The pilots flew in a tight formation to send off a radar signal resembling that of a large commercial airliner.
Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp in World War II, honored those who endured the Holocaust. He carried a small pencil drawing titled ``Moon Landscape'' by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed at Auschwitz.
He also packed a credit-card sized microfiche of the Bible given him by Israeli President Moshe Katsav and some mezuzas _ small cases that are hung on door frames of Jewish homes and contain biblical inscriptions.
Ramon's father gave him family photos to take into space and a brother had a letter stowed away in the shuttle that Ramon read in orbit.
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