Aviva Gileadi

Aviva Gileadi was born in 1917 in Budapest

Aviva Gileadi was born Eva Fischmann on November 26, 1917, in Budapest, to Samuel Fischmann and Gizella Kupferstein. She studied at the University of Budapest and earned her PhD there.

During World War II she was sent to a forced labor camp near Budapest. She was put on a transport to Auschwitz but escaped and hid until the Red Army reached Budapest in January 1945. In 1946 she moved to Vienna and married Michael Gileadi, an X-ray technician.

In 1948 she immigrated to Israel and took the name Aviva. She taught at the high school of Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha and worked for a time at the Weizmann Institute. In 1955 she joined the Technion in Haifa, and in 1958 she moved to its new Department of Nuclear Engineering.

A scholarship took her to the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Michigan. There she completed a course for reactor operators and received an operator license. She later helped start the BONUS reactor in Puerto Rico, trained its engineers and taught a master's class in nuclear engineering.

She was married twice and had 2 children with Michael Gileadi. She died on June 8, 2001, in Tampa, Florida.