Postdoc in Israel – Pure Madness or Lion-hearted Courage?

What exactly is a postdoc, and how do you (not) become one?

A postdoc is that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel called a PhD, the one you sometimes think you’ll never quite reach. In fact, it’s one of two lights: on your way there you must resist the dazzling neon glow of the commercial sector. But if your head is still buzzing with questions about how the world around you works, if you want to dive deeper into your field, or if you simply dream of becoming a future PI, then a postdoc may well be the right path. (Perhaps you’re wondering why anyone would want to become the number π. PI stands for Principal Investigator, in the science world simply a group leader, but you will soon discover that the job is closer to that of a psychological intervention expert.)

So you’ve decided to stay in academia. Congratulations! (Well… probably.) But how do you turn that pleasant dream into reality? I dreamt up my postdoc halfway through my PhD, in 2022, and quite by accident. I realised that I was spending almost all my time in the lab. That certainly helped my results, but I had never been a complete lab rat and wanted a bit more from life. So I signed up for an intensive summer course in Hebrew, a language that had always fascinated me, with the main aim of making friends outside science. That part worked. But by sheer accident, I also found myself a postdoc.

I needed to leave work early to make it to the course, and my excellent supervisor Martin Dračínský at the IOCB in Prague was on holiday. So I went to inform my colleague Radek, who was standing in for him that week. Honestly, I expected him to mumble something indistinct, like any NMR spectroscopist lost in the chaotic forest of peaks in their spectrum would. Instead, he changed my life. He asked whether I might like to do a postdoc in Israel, because he had always seen me at the Weizmann Institute.

At that time I barely knew what a postdoc was, let alone the Weizmann Institute. But Radek promptly pulled it up online. And so, in my very first Hebrew lesson, I announced that I wanted to learn Hebrew so that I could travel to the Weizmann Institute (whose existence I had learned about exactly fifty minutes earlier). Everyone laughed. I laughed too, because the postdoc was still far away. When my supervisor Martin returned, I jokingly told him I was going to the Weizmann Institute. He replied that actually Lucio Frydman, one of the best NMR scientists in the world, worked there.

Suddenly my future postdoc had a face. After a while spent browsing papers whose titles I barely understood, and watching various interviews, including Spanish ones where the only word I caught was resonancia, the day came when, to the enthusiastic cheers of my colleagues, I finally emailed Lucio Frydman to ask if I could do a postdoc in his group. The cheering was soon joined by the thunder of shock when he replied the very same day: yes.

How do you prepare for something you cannot possibly prepare for?

Of course, you can’t just go and do a postdoc with someone you’ve only seen in a Spanish video you didn’t understand. So I met Lucio in person at a conference in Glasgow in the summer of 2023. About two weeks later he arranged for me to visit his lab as well. I happened to be travelling to Israel anyway for a summer school organised in cooperation with the IOCB, although he himself was abroad at the time. Once I saw the campus with my own eyes, a few time-shifted emails followed, and the answer was an overwhelming yes! yes! yes!

And then came that Saturday morning.

I woke up in Prague because the app Tzofar, which reports rocket attacks in Israel, kept sending alerts. There were so many that I thought the app had broken. But that was just the hopeful part of my brain speaking. The rational part knew perfectly well that Tzofar is never broken. I had to uninstall it just to make it stop. Then I turned on the television.

It was the morning of Saturday, 7 October 2023. The terrorist organisation Hamas had entered Israeli territory, murdering 1,139 people, including small children and infants, and abducting 252 civilians to the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, central Israel was being bombarded with salvos of rockets. Perhaps it would have been different if my postdoc plans had still been an abstract idea. But by then it had real faces attached to it. Not for a second did I consider withdrawing my application. I immediately tried to reach Lucio. I honestly don’t remember what we wrote in those emails. And I’m actually quite glad the IOCB archives have swallowed them.

Preparations continue according to plan… and a word about funding

The seventh of October is something that will never stop hurting. After about two months of checking almost every day that my future professor and his family were still alive, we resumed preparations for my arrival. 

And there was one more thing, which was my idea: Applications for fellowships. It is always better to arrive at your postdoc lab with a suitcase full of money. (To be fair, it’s better to arrive anywhere with a suitcase full of money.) Sometimes a lab simply doesn’t have the funds. If you cannot support yourself, it won’t work. Sometimes you need extra money for conferences, because institutional funding isn’t enough for all your globe-trotting. But even if a lab has plenty of funding, fellowships give you two invaluable things: autonomy and connections.

If you decide to change fields during your postdoc, and you probably should, at least a bit, and I don’t mean switching from a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer to a 600 MHz one, you must prepare for the fact that things will not go well at first. Certainly not as well as they did during your PhD. You will have to learn a lot. You may feel useless to your supervisor. Welcome to the bottom of the heap. At the very least, knowing that you are not a financial burden to them helps enormously. It also makes it much easier to maintain a healthy work-life balance.And then there are the connections. A network of people who support you, who are in the same boat, with whom you can share experiences, joys, and worries: it’s priceless. I was incredibly lucky and secured not one, but actually two fellowships: one from the Experientia Foundation and one from the Canadian Azrieli Foundation. I still can’t quite believe that I know the Dvořáks [Hana and Dalimil Dvořák, founders of the Experientia Foundation – ed.] personally. The story of how they phoned me with the result and I told them it must be some kind of prank, and how I burst into tears when I realised it wasn’t, has probably already become an urban legend. My funding therefore covers four years in total.

How long should a postdoc be?

That raises an interesting question: how long should a postdoc last? I probably won’t be the first person to tell you that it isn’t just about the duration. It’s also about what you expect from it. Do you want to rotate through several labs to strengthen your CV and get a permanent position more quickly (the next seemingly unreachable light at the end of another tunnel)? Do you want to publish as many papers as possible as quickly as possible? Do you want to solve a particular scientific problem—even if it takes eight years?  Are you simply doing the obligatory postdoc before returning to a promised job in the Czech Republic? Or do you have nowhere to go afterwards?  Are you a temporary visitor abroad, or are you trying to integrate?

For me, a successful postdoc means learning something new. Knowing that I have progressed in my field. Experiencing a new culture. Meeting new people. Getting to know myself. I am honestly very glad that I can spend (at least!) four years with Lucio. I truly have a great deal to learn from him, scientifically and personally. It gives me time to reflect on my progress and explore Israel without constant existential worries about what comes next.

Well… existential worries are relative. It’s still Israel, after all. About a week before my scheduled departure there was some rocket attack from Iran. I simply said to myself: forget it, I’ve made the plans and I’m going anyway.

Hitting a (Western) wall

It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read about the Middle East, how many times you tried to imagine what it will feel like when an air-raid siren splits the air, or how sympathetic you are to Jewish culture. All of that suddenly becomes completely irrelevant when you are standing in Terminal 1 of Prague Airport. Your entire nine-year academic life to date has led to this moment: boarding a plane to the Weizmann Institute. And tears are rolling down your cheeks. When you step out at Ben-Gurion Airport and realise that rockets are no longer something on television but part of your daily reality, that is quite an experience.

Welcome to a war zone.

Landing on your feet

It must be said that, at least from what I’ve heard about other institutions, arriving as a postdoc at Weizmann is like landing on a cloud. The moment you arrive, you receive keys to a flat. Yes, a flat! Postdocs are entitled to a starter apartment guaranteed for a year, and thanks to the current geopolitical situation it is no problem to extend the lease. No deposit required. Just move your luggage into your new nest. If you’ve paid for it, the apartment also comes with bed linen and kitchen equipment ready for you. My wonderful friend Martina had baked brownies for me, and my mum packed chicken schnitzels. 

In fact, I received two essential pieces of advice about starting a postdoc: Bring some food, and pack enough clothes so that you don’t have to do laundry for the first two weeks. Who has time for laundry anyway? Weizmann also gives every postdoc a week’s free access to the swimming pool and the gym. Since there is an outdoor pool, I highly recommend timing your arrival with the opening of the outdoor pool season. I timed mine with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. I suspect I spent most of my first week by the pool.

But even the softest bed has a spring poking out. You must immediately open a bank account and get a phone number. But you cannot get a phone number without an Israeli credit card. And you cannot open a bank account without an Israeli phone number. I leave the solution to you. Creative approaches welcome. The institute offers help. I speak Hebrew, at least well enough to open a bank account and arrange a phone number, and even so it was quite an adventure, especially with holiday opening hours: half a day open, three days closed, half a day open, two days closed. Every morning I had to check whether I was supposed to go to work that day. Remembering the schedule in advance was beyond my mental capacity. Anyone who arrives for a postdoc in Israel without speaking Hebrew has my boundless admiration… mixed with some concern for their sanity.

And how do you communicate here?

Your level of Hebrew matters a great deal. First, everyone treats you more kindly. Suddenly the impossible becomes possible. Second, in the canteen you receive the biggest and juiciest schnitzel, far better than the one given to the English-speaking fool standing next to you. Officially, of course, the Weizmann Institute is one of the world’s leading scientific institutions and its official language is English. Of course it is. ENGLISH. Which means we rarely speak it. But unfortunately we rarely speak Hebrew either. At Weizmann we speak something called Weizmannish, a mixture of English, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish. People come from all over the world. And this migration does not only apply to scientists but to the entire Jewish population. You can be born in Israel and still speak fluent Russian. You might arrive from Argentina but remember Yiddish from childhood. You might be born in Israel to Israeli parents and still have Spanish spoken at home. Most people here are at least bilingual. Since we newcomers usually cannot keep up with the rapid Hebrew, colleagues help us out in English. And when we suddenly remember a Hebrew word in the middle of an English sentence, we proudly insert it. Then there are the two people who still remember Central European Yiddish. And you hear sentences like: “I almost look gesund!” or  “Why is that signal so shpitsik?”

Losing your name

Another thing nobody warns you about when you move abroad is that you will lose your name. Unless your parents chose it with remarkable foresight, but even then human creativity tends to win. At Weizmann I was registered in Hebrew as Suzana. I asked why, given that Hebrew actually has the letter zayin that perfectly represents the sound Z, for example in the word zuz (movement). They explained that Suzana is a common name among Russian immigrants. That was the wrong answer. With my surname it simply didn’t fit, so armed with a Wikipedia page, I forced the administration to rename me Shoshana, the Hebrew equivalent of my name. They did it without hesitation. But for a while it felt like a spy film: people called you by that name, but most of the time you didn’t realise they meant you. Now I respond to everything: Zuzka, Shoshi, Zuska, Žužka, Zuzana, Suzana, Suzanne, Zuzu, Zusazana, Shoshana, Suzuka…and also to the special whistle my colleague Elton uses as my personal frequency.

Culture shock

For someone from Central Europe, the Middle East can be quite a cultural shock. For the first three months I called Israel Hum-istan, because the background noise here is extraordinary. Fighter jets overhead. Air-raid sirens. Someone honking like an idiot. Someone shouting like a lunatic. Someone honking and shouting. A humming fridge. Air-conditioning units roaring whether heating or cooling. Construction work, at night. And construction is everywhere. You might think the obvious solution is earplugs or headphones. But remember: cyclists and motorcyclists ride on pavements here, and traffic rules are merely suggestions. This constant chaos contrasts sharply with the eerie silence of Shabbat, when public transport stops and almost everything closes. Every week, Rehovot feels like it has gone into pandemic lockdown again.

On the other hand, people here judge less and condemn less. They are more honest, sometimes disarmingly so, and generally kinder. A good deed, known here as a mitzvah, is seen as an act of pure kindness, not something done in expectation of gratitude or admiration. Still, Israelis are a grateful nation. All you need to say is that you’re from Czechoslovakia, and everyone remembers that Czechoslovakia sent weapons and aircraft to the newly founded State of Israel and trained its pilots. So Israelis may be loud, ask intrusive questions, and sometimes you’re not sure whether you’re having a discussion or an argument. But once you are one of theirs, they will never let you fall. There will always be someone willing to help, even if they are a professor and you are “just” a postdoc.

In the Czech Republic I sometimes felt I irritated people. But Israel and I? We simply fit together. Like a lid on a pot.

What if a war breaks out during your postdoc?

People worry about the usual things. What if I don’t like my postdoc?  What if I’m not good enough?  What if I get ill?  What if I get pregnant? What if I don’t get along with my supervisor? But hardly anyone asks: what if a war breaks out? If you’re going to Israel, perhaps you should.

Because war did break out. And it hit hard. I don’t like talking about it much, so let’s just say that at one point my head nearly got blown off. The Weizmann Institute became one of the targets of Iran’s military programme, and the campus suffered significant damage from ballistic missile strikes. The closest hit destroyed a building about six hundred metres from our house. It is a strange experience sitting in a shelter and feeling the entire house lift and shake above you. And the sound… We know how far away a barking dog is. Or a tram. But how far away is a ballistic missile strike? Is it our house? The one across the street? Two kilometres away? In one barrage you hear several impacts, some louder, some quieter. You message friends trying to triangulate them. “Ta-ta-ta,” reports M.  “Ta-TA-TA,” says L. You piece together the likely locations. And then come the smaller explosions as the shock wave shatters windows, knocks down trees, and blows doors open.  

If that didn’t already sound chaotic enough, it all happened during the very week when my mother came to visit and see how my postdoc was going. So we toured Israel. Jerusalem, two days in Haifa, Roman ruins, the beach in Tel Aviv. I showed her the lab and my flat. And then bombs started falling. Sorry, Mum!!! She handled it brilliantly, though. She stayed a bit longer than planned and didn’t leave the house for four days, but otherwise she remembers it fondly. We eventually evacuated via Egypt, she wanted to see Sinai anyway. Near Dimona she got to practise lying down beside the road during a rocket alert, which is standard procedure if you’re caught outside. She met the entire five-member Czech group at Weizmann. In the end we flew home on a government evacuation flight and even saw the Kbely military airport. Not everyone gets an all-inclusive trip like that. Afterwards we spent about two months jumping every time a plane flew overhead or a phone rang, but otherwise, as I say, perfectly calm.

You have to love it

Recently a master’s student at Weizmann asked me whether I enjoyed working with Lucio. Back home we say that one action is worth a thousand words. So I told her:

I have the passport of a safe country where I am not persecuted.
I live in Prague, a favourite destination for Israeli tourists.
I was here during the twelve-day war with Iran, when the institute was hit.
And I came back to work with Lucio.

I think that says enough. To survive at the Weizmann Institute, you truly have to love what you do. And I love nuclear magnetic resonance. The work here is far more demanding than anything I experienced in the Czech Republic. We don’t just use NMR (and MRI) to determine structures and interactions. We try to push the methods themselves further—for example by increasing their sensitivity. During my PhD I knew that every day I would leave with a measured spectrum, even if it simply told me what experiment I needed to repeat or what compound needed further purification.

Here I once spent three days trying to coax a signal out of the machine because my new experiment simply refused to work. You dive deeper into spin physics, quantum mechanics, and the inner workings of the NMR magnet itself. You need to understand every component. You learn to appreciate an oscilloscope. Sometimes I miss deciphering chemical structures. I would happily return to that Sudoku puzzle. But now that I’ve seen what lies beneath the surface of NMR, I can’t imagine going back to simply measuring straightforward spectra. Still, there is always the possibility that I will end up being the writer after all.

In conclusion

Many people described my decision to go to Israel for a postdoc after 7 October 2023 as completely insane. But I still believe it was one of the best – and bravest – decisions of my life. And I say that even now, at the end of February 2026, when I’ve spent the past month living under the constant refrain: “Tomorrow the war with Iran will begin.” Actually, I think tomorrow it really will. [This line was written on 27 February. – ed.] Of course, life here is not for everyone. But I love it.

If I could give one piece of advice to those of you considering a postdoc, it would be this: don’t be afraid to aim high and pursue your dream – even if others call it crazy. It’s worth it.

If you would like to read more about my adventures in Israel, you can visit my blog (in Czech) Magnets and Rockets.