Ilan Chaim was a longtime member of The Jerusalem Post family, with his trademark humor and copy editing acumen having helped numerous generations of staffers at this newspaper.
His time with the paper included serving as chief copy editor – at the helm of staff who check text for errors – and his was the genius behind the creation of our Style Guide.
This manual is a bible to our publication. It dictates our many rules about transliteration, the spelling of place names, how we refer to money and other abbreviations, and so much more. It is the spine upon which editing the publication rests, and it all goes back to Ilan Chaim.
Since he created it, stewardship of the Style Guide has been passed down through many editors, and I currently have the honor of continuing Ilan’s legacy. I also had the distinct honor of consulting with him about it while he was still with us.
Ilan passed away one month ago, in October 2025. This brief summary of mine does not do justice to the life of a man who had done so much.
I only knew Ilan from work. But when I went to his funeral, I was greeted with an absolutely packed hall. Emotional stories were shared by his family members, things about him I never knew about. The way people described him, he sounded almost like a larger than life figure, whose adventures were something out of a novel – so far removed from the copy editor I knew.
This tribute to him cannot properly encapsulate everything this man was, but we can at least pay respect to his legacy at the paper.
This is a tribute to Ilan Chaim, from some of the people who worked with him over the years.
David Brinn, senior editor
Born Allan Smolover in Pittsburgh, Ilan was a true child of the ’60s, with all that entailed. He arrived in Israel with a motorcycle before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, an adventure-loving hippie who fell in love with Israel – and with his future wife, Janice Beiss, who describes him as “the love of my life.”
For much of the last 35 years, he was a mainstay at the Post, making sure the stories that got published made sense and contained the fewest errors possible. He trained editors and reporters alike in the intricacies and pitfalls of the English language.
“I love to crunch words,” he explained to me once in the early 1990s, when he mentored me, like so many other Post staffers past and present, in the art of stating things clearly. He was a word processor before Microsoft thought of it.
One former colleague gave tribute by writing, “Ilan was opinionated. He gave ‘under way’ and ‘underway’ each their own meaning, as he did ‘every day’ and ‘everyday.’ I can’t see those words any otherway” (error intended; the two-word versions are adverbs after verbs, the one-word ones are adjectives before nouns).
Handsome like an Adonis with tight blondish curls, an unbounded curiosity, and an encyclopedic fount of knowledge, Ilan could hold court on just about any subject, from world history and Judaism to motorcycle engines and his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers football team. And unlike many people who see themselves as experts on those and other subjects, he really was. And if he wasn’t, he would school himself until he was.
He loved to impart wisdom. One evening, on the night desk in the middle of a busy shift, Ilan used the copy editors and the layout staff as human planets to explain how the solar system interacts.
In later years, he wrote a loosely autobiographical novel titled The Flying Blue Meanies: Surviving the bipolar ’60s in America and Israel, and he would kvell over the accomplishments of his four children, proudly announcing whenever a new grandchild came along.
Back in the ’90s, when the Post was still located at its old and cavernous Yirmiyahu Street structure, Ilan and I worked countless night shifts together. After the intensity of the evening, we would topple out into the empty parking lot at midnight and play a game of long-range Frisbee – sometimes for an hour.
Two adults running around like kids, without a care in the world. I will always be grateful to Ilan for granting me that memory. He indeed was a comet that burned bright and long.
My only regret is that he’s not around to line-edit this tribute. He undoubtedly would have made it better.
Ori Lewis, senior editor
I will always remember Ilan as a stalwart of the newsroom and the go-to guy for any queries about editing and so much more. With a wealth of knowledge on such a broad range of subjects, he was the “Swiss Army Knife” that every newsroom needs when the going gets tough. Invariably, and in his calm demeanor, he would have a solution to offer that would save the moment and spare much head scratching by his colleagues.
He always pointed out the next day when he found a mistake that could have been avoided, but did so with grace and humor, which showed that instead of just criticizing, it was better to teach younger colleagues how to do it right next time.
We worked together in the newsroom at the Post for about a decade until I left in 2000 and we parted ways, although Ilan was not someone who would be forgotten because his presence in the newsroom was formidable.
Our paths converged once more when each of us returned to the newspaper more recently, both older and wiser. Ilan would sometimes turn up for work wearing one of his favorite T-shirts, which read Saba-Sababa (“cool grandpa”). He was still dedicated to the task at hand as a copy editor, but he also shared that with his devotion to his significant cohort of grandchildren.
Ilan’s last tenure at the Post didn’t last long. His health was not at its best, and he retired from the newspaper for a second time about a year ago. His passing in his late 70s, even though not such a young age, is still a shock. He left us far too soon.
Rest in peace, Ilan.
Brian Freeman, night editor
I made aliyah in 1989 as a single person and started working at The Jerusalem Post the following year.
At that time, there was no Internet, nor emails or cellphones. I had made aliyah alone, without family or friends coming along, and communication with the Old Country was quite sporadic, as regular phone calls were very expensive back then.
Also, everyone who worked sat the Post came into the office at that time, many of them veteran olim, and they served as surrogate family. One of those was Ilan Chaim, who was the head copy editor on the night desk and a mentor to me.
He had made aliyah about 15 years earlier and took me under his wing to show me how to be a proper copy editor, as well as demonstrating how it was possible to remain in Israel long term.
His knowledge about newspaper work, Israeli history, politics and culture, the Jewish world and, it seemed, everything else, was extensive, and I did all I could to soak up as much of his wisdom as I could during the many years spent with him working on the night desk.
He was already married with four children, and I, just a greenhorn back then, could see from his example how it was possible to have a “real life” in Israel.
Ilan and I had our “special time” on the night desk, as we were often the only ones working on Saturday evening until the rest of the staff arrived later. Our conversation would quickly evolve into the news of the day or his experiences in his early years in Israel or his recent army reserve duty protecting the Western Wall – at which point we would burst into a rendition of the song “Sisu et Yerushalayim,” with lyrics that included “On the walls of the City of David, I have placed guards throughout the entire day and all night.”
Thank you, Ilan, for laying out a vision for me those many years ago of how to be a dedicated Israeli citizen, a professional newspaper man, and helping to guide me through those early years of integrating into society here.
Ruth Beloff, senior proofreader
Both a colleague and a friend,
Ilan was a special blend:
Bold and daring as could be
But strict grammarian to a T.
He relished all his close-knit clan,
A warm and loving family man.
With his heartfelt, winning smile,
He’d gladly go that extra mile.
The time spent in his company
Will hold a cherished place for me.