The modern world is rarely amazed by Israel's nuclear capability, largely because the country's atomic arsenal has been an acknowledged open secret for over half a century. Rather than shock, international reactions today center on a complex mix of geopolitical acceptance, concern, and debate over its unique nuclear doctrine. Israel has never officially confirmed or denied possessing atomic bombs.

Critics of the Jewish state do not usually debate among themselves whether Jews had any particular involvement in the creation of the terrible bomb that, for all intents and purposes, has brought many decades of peace. The history of the US and Russia throughout the 20th century provides important information in this regard.

The scientists who developed the atomic bomb in the USA were Jewish, with a significant number being refugees who fled persecution in Europe. Key figures included Robert Oppenheimer, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Hans Bethe.

Those responsible for creating the atomic bomb in the USSR also included many Jews, both as scientists and as spies (in this case operating in the US). Among the most crucial scientists and operatives were Theodore Hall, George Koval, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Ethel Rosenberg.

There is a name of a Jewishlady, however, that is little known and whose importance for the Soviets was extreme. She was a legendary Soviet spy and born in the village of Rzhavyntsi in the Khotinsky Uyezd of the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine).

Born Esther Yoelevna Rosentsveig, she always used different names: Elisaveta Zarubina, Lisa Rozensweig, Elizabeth Zarubina, Elizaveta Gorskaya, and others. She was the daughter of Yoel Rosentsveig and Ita Rappaport, and lived in Bessarabia (modern-day Ukraine/Moldova).
"Elisaveta Zarubina" was a highly successful Soviet NKVD/KGB intelligence officer who, along with her husband Vasily Zarubin, managed a network that gathered crucial American nuclear secrets during World War II. Rather than personally creating or stealing the formula, she coordinated the espionage rings that supplied Moscow with classified data.

She joined the Soviet intelligence apparatus (the OGPU, later the NKVD) in 1924, successfully operating across Europe, Turkey, and the United States under various aliases such as Elizabeth Zubilin. While stationed in the United States, she and Soviet vice-consul Gregory Kheifetz cultivated relationships with a network of scientists linked to the Manhattan Project.

Zarubina is famously credited with establishing a social circle of young, left-leaning physicists around Robert Oppenheimer to secure access to progress reports and secrets regarding the atomic bomb. Intelligence retrieved by various spies and scientists was funneled to her, and she and her team were responsible for making the highly complex work of American and British scientists accessible and useful to the Soviet nuclear program. Her contribution was pivotal in providing crucial intelligence that accelerated the Soviet project, supplementing information passed on by other prominent atomic scientists like Klaus Fuchs.

Ladino

Often forgotten, this beautiful and young woman of high ability lived her entire life with multiple different identities and using a vast number of languages with impressive perfection.
Esther was a brilliant linguist fluent in Ladino, Yiddish, Russian, English, German, French, and Romanian. She spoke Ladino, as she was from a Sephardic Jewish family and was a highly educated polyglot. While she was born in the Russian Empire, Sephardic Jews settled across the Mediterranean, including the Ottoman Empire and parts of Eastern Europe. In addition, in the early 1930s, Zarubina was stationed in Turkey by Soviet intelligence, and was integrated into a large, vibrant Sephardic community that spoke Ladino, providing a natural environment for her to practice and perfect her command of the language.