Azbel was born in 1932, in
Kharkiv (at the time, in the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) to a family of physicians. From 1941, aged 9 to 12, he and his family lived under wartime evacuation in (
Siberia). In 1944, the family returned to Kharkiv. In 1948 Azbel graduated from high school and in the same year entered the
National University of Kharkiv. After graduation, he taught mathematics at evening school. In 1958, he defended his doctorate (Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences) under the supervision of
Lev Landau and
Pyotr Kapitsa. In 1964 he began working at
Moscow State University and concurrently as a section chair at the
Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 1972, Azbel applied for
emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel, and in 1973 (a full four years before leaving the Soviet Union) was appointed a lecturer at
Tel Aviv University, where he initially gave his lectures by telephone. Having been refused exit permission from the Soviet Union, he participated in the movement of
refuseniks in the USSR in the mid-seventies. Azbel finally emigrated from the USSR in 1977 and was appointed Professor at
Tel Aviv University. He lived mainly in Israel until his death in 2020. == Scientific contributions==