Shulamit Gross

Shulamit Gross was born in 1923 in Hrodna

Shulamit Gross was born Shulamit Lifszyc in 1923 in Grodno, Poland, today Hrodna in Belarus. Her parents were Fryda and Mejer Lifszyc. Both parents were murdered at Treblinka in 1943.

She attended the Tarbut school in her city and then studied at the polytechnic institute in Minsk. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, she fled to Tashkent and studied geology there, graduating with honors in 1945. She then did crystallography research at Moscow University.

In 1950 she immigrated to Israel with her husband, film director Natan Gross, and their baby son Yaakov. She joined the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1958 and moved to the Geological Survey in 1961. In 1964 she became a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studying the Hatrurim Formation.

In 1977 she published a monograph describing 123 mineral species from the formation. She described the new minerals bentorite, ye'elimite and hatrurite, and showed that the rocks formed through pyrometamorphism. The minerals grossite and shulamitite were named after her.

She received the first Rafael Freund Award of the Israeli Geological Society in 1979. She died in 2012.