The son of a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, one of the sites where the Nazis attempted to exterminate European Jewry during World War II, he carried into space the drawing "Moon Landscape" made by a 14-year-old Jewish boy killed at the camps.

Ramon was not religious, according to Ha'aretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, but decided to eat kosher food in orbit - the first time kosher food was placed on a space mission.

"I'm secular in my background, but I'm going to respect all kinds of Jews all over the world," Ramon told the newspaper. "For Israel and for the Jewish community, it's a very symbolic event."

His wife, Rona, and their four children - Assaf, 14; Tal, 12; Iftah, 9; and Noa, 5 - have been living in the United States the past four years as he prepared for the flight.

Ramon, 48, was the youngest of eight pilots who participated in the daring 1981 attack that destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor before it could go on-line. The pilots flew extremely low and in tight formation, enabling them to fly over enemy airspace for a protracted period without being detected.

The mission was Ramon's first, retired Brigadier General Amir Nachumi, who commanded the attack, said last night.

It was initially condemned internationally but later praised by countries alarmed by Iraq's attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction, Nachumi said.

"He had never been fired at before," Nachumi said. "... He was cool and composed, like most of the guys. He definitely fit in."

The attack against Iraq "was one concert with the best players and the best conductors ever," said Doobi Yoffe, a retired colonel who met Ramon in the mid-1970s and was with him on the mission. "We kept in touch ever since. Such an experience bonds you together in love, sympathy, and mutual understanding.

"Ilan is exactly as you saw him on TV - a good-looking boy who loved flight and did everything quietly and with a smile," Yoffe said. "He played the piano wonderfully. I always envied him that. "

Ramon, who also was a skier and squash player, was deeply serious about his work and capable of concealing much from his friends and fellow officers when that was necessary. His specialty, aside from flying, was an intimate knowledge of the F-16 fighter jet.

Ramon also never "exposed the deep feelings of an offspring of a Holocaust survivor" until the 20th reunion of the Osirak pilots in 2001, Yoffe said, though Yoffe declined to elaborate.

"He was a man's man," Yoffe said. "There was nothing not nice about him. We all envied him this opportunity" to go into space, and this was not changed by yesterday's disaster, for "we shall always be jealous of the spacemen."

Ramon entered the military during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and graduated from flight school the following year. After the Osirak strike, he was a combat pilot in Israel's war in Lebanon beginning in 1982 and eventually accumulated more than 4,000 hours of flight time in a variety of combat aircraft.

He graduated from Tel Aviv University in 1987 with a degree in electronics and computer engineering.

Ramon was accepted as a NASA payload specialist in 1997 and worked primarily on a multispectral camera that records desert aerosol - a fine dust that blows from Africa to the Middle East and affects the weather.

He was also conducting several Israeli experiments during the flight. One, designed by students at a technological high school in Kiryat Motzkin, looked at crystal production in space. Another, designed by the Israel Space Institute and involving Israeli and Palestinian medical students, centered on the effects of weightlessness on bacteria.

Ramon's last message to his family apparently was an e-mail sent Friday to his wife in which he said that "even though everything here is spectacular, I can't wait to see you. A big hug to you and kisses to the children."

The couple also sent musical messages.

Rona Ramon, who was invited by NASA to send her husband a song, chose a tune by Arik Einstein, a popular Israeli singer of the 1970s, that wondered "will you hear my voice, oh my distant one, will you hear my voice wherever you might be?"

Ramon picked an Einstein melody for wakeup music on the shuttle flight. The song asks: "What do you do when you get up in the morning? The same things, but slowly. What do you hear when the wind is whining? The sad song that wasn't written."

By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff, and Alon Tuval, Globe Correspondent