Frank Lowy

Frank Lowy was born in 1930 in Fiľakovo

Lowy was born in 1930 in Fiľakovo, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish family of Hungarian speakers. In 1942 the family fled to Budapest. His father was deported and murdered in Auschwitz, while Lowy survived in the Budapest ghetto.

In 1946 he sailed for the Land of Israel on the ship Yagur, but the British caught it and he was held in Cyprus. He later lived in Haifa and worked in construction and as a clerk at Bank Leumi. He joined the Haganah and then the Golani Brigade, and fought in the War of Independence.

In 1952 he left Israel for Australia. With John Saunders he built a shopping center in Sydney, and their company Westfield was listed on the stock exchange in 1960. The company entered the United States in 1977 and later the United Kingdom.

Lowy was a director of the Reserve Bank of Australia from 1995 to 2005 and chaired Football Federation Australia from 2003 to 2015. He founded the Lowy Institute in 2003. In 2011 his sons took over the management of Westfield, which was sold to Unibail-Rodamco in 2018.

He married Shirley Rusanow in 1954, and they had 3 sons. He moved to Israel at the end of 2018, and he chairs the Institute for National Security Studies. His wife died in Tel Aviv in December 2020.