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Profiles

  • Dr. Saul Gerald Cohen (1916 - 2010)
    Ann Fleischer then married Dr Saul G Cohen, who later died from heart failure in 2010 at the age of 93. Source: Added by: GMonat on 27 Jan 2021 to
  • Max Mechel Levin (1878 - 1961)
    Max Levin born 1878 Bilsk, Russia - died 1961 Chicago, IL. Hebrew name was Mechel Levin as per Bris Certificate on grandson Henry and Michael on the marriage record of daughter Lucille. Additional date...
  • Public domain
    Jacob W. 'J.W.' Davis (1834 - 1908)
    Jacob W. Davis (born Jacob Youphes) (1831–1908) was a Latvian-born American tailor who is credited with inventing modern jeans by using sturdy cloth and rivets to strengthen weak points in the seams...
  • Prof. Dr. Amnon Katz (1935 - 2000)
    Published on: 10/4/2000 ....His family escaped Nazi authorities in Poland ( to the Soviet Union) when he was four years old and settled in the Middle East ( going from the Soviet Union to Iran and late...
  • Samuel Hirschhorn (1865 - 1936)

History is full of Jewish inventors, some of whom are responsible for many of the most important inventions of our time. This is the start of a collaborative project of Jewish Inventors. It has so far been based on the data from Encyclopaedia Britannica (2007), and The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement, both of which state the list of 321 great inventions goes back to 13,000 B.C. Many are so old that no individual inventor can be identified (such as beer 6000 B.C, wine 4000 B.C, or the boomerang).

This number of Jewish involvement in inventions is roughly one hundred times what one would expect.

Ref: The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement - Steven L. Pease

Some of the inventors have been honored by Encyclopaedia Britannica. Many of them have shaped world history and have made a difference to our daily lives.

To edit the project or to add inventors you will first need to JOIN THE PROJECT.
Please contact Pam Karp with any queries or start a project discussion

A

  • Robert Adler - Television Remote Control (1950)
  • Ruth Arnon - Israel biochemist and co-developer of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone
  • Selig Percy Amoils - South African Opthalmologist and biomedical engineer
  • Zhores Alferov - the heterotransistor. Winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • Hermann Aron- German engineer- electric meter.
  • Chaim Aronson-Lithuanian inventor and memoirist.
  • Hertha Marks Ayrton- English mathematician and engineer- first woman to win Hughes Medal for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.

B

  • Donát Bánki - carburetor (1893)
  • László Bíró - Ballpoint Pen (1938)
  • Emile Berliner – gramophone
  • Samuel E Blum - LASIK eye surgery
  • Ralph H. Baer – father of the Video Games
  • Bernhard Baron – cigarette making machine
  • Felix Berezin
  • Eli Biham- differential cryptoanalysis.
  • Simcha Blass – new water drip system
  • Charles K. Bliss- pictorial symbolic language
  • Baruch Samuel Blumberg - American doctor and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek)
  • Dan Boneh - applied cryptography and computer security

C

  • Rabbi Dr. Michael Cahn - Metzitza tube
  • Stanley N. Cohen - Genetic Engineering (1973)
  • Claude Cohen-Tannoudji - research in methods of laser cooling and trapping atoms
  • Fred Cohen - inventor of computer virus defense techniques
  • Stanley Norman Cohen - National Medal of Science in 1988.
  • Frank Benjamin Colten- chemist- synthesized norethynodrel.

D

  • Carl Djerassi - chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill (OCP). He is considered "The father of The Pill".

E

F

G

H

I

J

  • Mary the Jewess (anywhere bet. I - III CE) She is attributed with the invention of several chemical apparatus and is considered to be the first non fictitious alchemist in the Western world.

K

L

M

N

O

  • J. Robert Oppenheimer - a theoretical physicist. He is often called the "father of the atomic bomb".
  • Stanford Ovshinsky - a prolific American inventor and scientist who had been granted well over 400 patents over fifty years, mostly in the areas of energy and information.

P Q

R

S

T

U V

W

  • Selman Waksman - Streptomycin
  • Gil Weinberg
  • Chaim Weizmann, First President of Israel - He was also a chemist who developed the ABE-process, which produces acetone through bacterial fermentation, one of the early modern biotechnological processes.
  • Richard Willstätter, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1915 - organic chemist whose determined of the structure of chlorophyll and other plant pigments, and co-invented paper chromatography.
  • Ricardo Wolf - invented the process of recovering iron from smelting process residue. He established the Wolf Foundation financing The Wolf Prize awarded in six fields: Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and an Art.

X Y Z

  • Rosalyn Sussman Yalow - radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique
  • Dr. Hiram S. Yellen - co-inventor with A. Goldstein of the Gumco Clamp, used in circumcision.
  • Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof - the creator of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language designed for international communication.
  • Abraham Zacuto - astronomer, astrologer, mathematician and historian who served as Royal Astronomer in the 15th century to King John II of Portugal. The crater Zagut on the Moon is named after him.
  • Moshe Zakai - the study of the theory of stochastic processes and its application to information and control problems; namely, problems of noise in communication radar and control systems.
  • Zeev Zalevsky - best known for his work on Super Resolution.
  • Alexander Zalmanov - a method of capillaries restoration with special Turpentine bath
  • Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich - played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons
  • Abraham Zelmanov - He first constructed, in 1944, the complete mathematical method to calculate physical observable quantities in the General Theory of Relativity (the theory of chronometric invariants). Applying the mathematical apparatus, in the 1940s, he established the basics of the theory of inhomogeneous anisotropic universe, where he determined specific kinds of all cosmological models — scenarios of evolution — which could be theoretically conceivable for a truly inhomogeneous and anisotropic Universe in the framework of Einstein's theory.
  • Jacob Ziv - Israeli computer scientist who, along with Abraham Lempel, developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms
  • Paul Maurice Zoll - Defibrillator/Cardiac Pacemaker (1952)