Franz Ollendorff

Franz (Chaim) Ollendorff was born in Berlin on March 15, 1900.[2] He studied engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and, while there, attended lectures by Max Planck and Albert Einstein at Berlin's Humboldt University, where his academic relationship and friendship with Einstein began.[2]

Ollendorff worked at the University of Danzig early in his career but was expelled in 1924 for antisemitic reasons.[2] That same year he joined the Siemens research department in Berlin, where he worked under the engineer Reinhold Ruedenberg, and he also made his first visit to the Technion in 1924.[1][2] From 1928 he taught in the engineering faculty of the Berlin Technische Hochschule.[1] He also conducted research alongside Professor Urlich, the head of the theoretical electrical-engineering department, who regarded him as a natural successor.[2]

In 1933 the Nazis dismissed Ollendorff from his academic post.[1][2] Following his dismissal, he joined the teaching staff of a Jewish public school in Berlin.[1] When the school and its staff relocated to Jerusalem in 1934, Ollendorff moved with them.[1]

He returned to Germany the following year, however, to organize the transfer of Jewish children to Eretz Israel through the newly established Youth Aliyah.[1] This work brought him back into danger: in 1937 the Gestapo expelled him from Germany.[1] After his expulsion he returned to Palestine and joined the staff of the Haifa Technion, where he would spend the rest of his professional life.[1]

Ollendorff became a full professor at the Haifa Technion in 1939.[1] He founded the department that later became the Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, served as its first dean, and broadened its scope from electrical engineering to encompass electrical and electronic engineering and additional fields.[2] He was subsequently appointed a research professor — the Technion's highest academic title — making him the first person in the institution's history to hold that rank.[2]

His research was unusually wide-ranging. He worked on electromagnetism, radar, and the biophysics of vision and hearing, drawing on the theories of Einstein and other distinguished physicists.[2] He also contributed to the development of electron microscopy, a technology capable of magnifying minute objects to reveal viruses and atomic structures.[2] Professor Ido Kaminer of the Viterbi Faculty has described Ollendorff as "one of the fathers of electron microscopy" and as the first researcher to apply Einstein's theory of relativity to analyzing the dynamics of free electrons in electromagnetic fields, with Kaminer's own electron-microscopy research building on Ollendorff's earlier work.[2]

Beyond his laboratory research, Ollendorff was a prolific author. His publications spanned electronics, physics, mathematics, acoustics, medical electronics, and technical education, including Die Grundlagen der Hochfrequenztechnik (1926), Erdstroeme (1928), Die Welt der Vektoren (1950), and Innere Elektronik (1955).[1] Die Welt der Vektoren, a 470-page introduction to vectors, tensors, and operators, was published by Springer Verlag in Vienna.[3]

In 1963 Ollendorff was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and served as the institute's vice president.[1] He was also the first Technion representative to become a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.[2]

Ollendorff's dedication to teaching extended well beyond the Technion's lecture halls. He taught voluntarily at the Basmat vocational high school because he believed that Hebrew youth must be exposed to science at a young age.[2] His interest in educating teenagers also led him to support the Technion's broader vocational high school programs.[1] Many Basmat graduates went on to study at the Technion and later pursued careers that helped lay the foundations of Israel's technology sector.[2]

Yossi Ackerman, who was Ollendorff's student at both Basmat and the Technion and later became president and CEO of Elbit Systems, recalled: "Ollendorff exposed us in our youth to the secrets of science. But most important — through him we learned to love science."[2] Reflecting his conviction that knowledge should be freely shared, Ollendorff opposed patent registration, and his numerous inventions were consequently never patented.[2]

Ollendorff received the Israel Prize in 1954 in the field of exact sciences, awarded for his research in magnetic fields.[1][4] His other honors included the IEEE Education Medal, the first Weizmann Prize, and the Rothschild Prize.[2] He also received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin.[2]

The Technion has preserved his legacy in lasting institutional form: a Minerva research center for communications and automation bears his name, as does an Ollendorff chair.[2] Ynet's profile marking the 125th anniversary of his birth identified Professor Eilat Baram-Tsabari as head of the chair.[2] The National Library of Israel holds the Franz Ollendorff Archive (reference ARC. 4* 1724), a collection measuring 0.6 meters that covers the period 1960–1982 and contains manuscripts, press clippings, and photographs in Hebrew and English.[5]

As a former member of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Ollendorff was among a group of prominent Israeli intellectuals organized by Eliezer Livneh that jointly submitted a petition to the Israeli government seeking to prevent the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.[6] The group included Martin Buber, Efreim Orbach, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Gabriel Stein.[6]

This activity occurred within a broader 1962 campaign. Later that year, Livneh, Stein, Orbach, and others founded the Committee for the Nuclear Disarmament of the Middle East with the support of Nahum Goldman.[6] The committee argued that nuclearization could endanger Israel and the Zionist project, and it advocated negotiations with other states in the region to prevent nuclear armament.[6]