President Chaim Weizmann

On 16 February 1949 the Constituent Assembly, which became the First Knesset, elected Chaim Weizmann the first President of Israel by 83 votes to 15 for the historian Joseph Klausner, and he was sworn in the next day at the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem. The veteran Zionist leader and chemist, whose diplomacy had won the Balfour Declaration, found that the Transition Law of 1949 made the office almost entirely ceremonial: real power lay with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the cabinet, and Weizmann openly regretted how little say he had. The Second Knesset re-elected him in November 1951.

Ill for much of his term, he worked mostly from his house in Rehovot, beside the institute that now bears his name, and published his memoirs, Trial and Error, in 1949. He died in Rehovot on 9 November 1952 and was buried in the garden of his home. His presidency set the pattern for the office: a head of state above party politics, a symbol of the nation's history rather than its government.