Felix Zandman

Felix Zandman was born in 1928 in Hrodna

Zandman was born to a Jewish family in Grodno, then in Poland and now in Belarus. In October 1941 he was sent to the Grodno Ghetto with his family. He survived the Holocaust hidden for 17 months by Jan and Anna Puchalski, together with his uncle Sender Freydowicz, who taught him mathematics in the hiding place.

The Soviet Army freed him in July 1944, and in 1946 he moved to France. From 1946 to 1949 he studied physics and engineering in Nancy. He later earned a doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne, on photoelasticity.

In France he taught at the French Air Academy and worked as an engineer for an aircraft engine maker. He developed the PhotoStress coating method for viewing stress in loaded structures. After moving to the United States, he led basic research at Tatnall Measuring Systems in Philadelphia.

In 1960 he and Sidney J. Stein presented the metal foil resistor, which stays stable under large temperature changes. He founded Vishay in 1962 with funding from his relative Alfred P. Slaner, and held 39 patents. He helped solve a gun accuracy problem in the Israeli Merkava tank and donated the solution to Israel.

Vishay opened 6 plants in Israel, 3 of them in the Negev. He received Israeli citizenship in 1994 and published an autobiography in 1995. He died in Philadelphia in 2011 and was buried in Kiryat Shaul Cemetery.