Seligman Swartzman Gillis Sandman Joffe Yachad Lederman Fleishman

David Elroi, a Biographical Sketch David Elroi (Hebrew: דוד אלר ואי , born David Roy Davidowitz; March 30, 1920 – May 26, 1993), was an American Israeli metallurgical chemist and intellectual. Born in Philadelphia, he emigrated with his family to Mandatory Palestine in his teen years and spent the majority of his life in Israel. However, the latter part of his life he spent in Denmark, Great Britain and the United States again, where he passed away in Wakefield, Rhode Island, at age 73. Early Life David Roy Davidowitz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 30, 1920, the oldest of three children to Rabbi Harry Solomon Davidowitz and Ida Davidowitz (née Bloom). His father, recently returned from the Western Front of World War I, was awarded a Purple Heart and a Victory Medal for his bravery as the first Jewish Chaplain to arrive in France and his subsequent battlefield injuries. However, the injuries temporarily deprived him of much of his voice and he was on a hiatus from his rabbinic calling when David was born in 1920, and then his sister Suzanne Gillan (née Davidowitz) in 1922. After earning his PhD from Dropsie College at the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, Rabbi Davidowitz reentered his calling, first in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1927, where David’s youngest sister, Eve Maseng (née Davidowitz) was born in 1928, and later in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1930. Following the urgings of his mother’s father, American industrialist and entrepreneur Samuel S. Bloom, an ardent Zionist who chose to emigrate to British Mandatory Palestine in 1926, David and his family emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1934. Due to his lack of Hebrew, David was sent to a boarding school in Haifa for his first year in Palestine, but graduated from Tel Aviv’s original high school, Gymnasia Herzliya. In 1938 he was admitted to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended university during World War II, so had to rely on his extended family in the Philadelphia area for support, as no travel back and forth to Palestine was possible. David earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1941 and proceeded to earn a Master of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1943. When the United States entered the war, David worked at the Exide plant in Philadelphia, which made submarine batteries, and then at a lab at Mount Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia until the end of the war. David returned to Palestine on the first day of 1947, where he was introduced to his sister Eve’s high school friend, Ruth Wagschal, an escapee from Nazi Austria. David and Ruth married in Tel Aviv on March 26, 1948, whereupon they followed the tradition of the day and replaced their “diaspora surname” with David (age 14) with sisters Suzanne (left) and Eve (right) and father Rabbi Harry S Davidowitz, in Italy, during sea voyage to emigrate to Palestine in 1934 the surname Elroi (David’s middle name, Roy, was probably a deciding factor in picking the new surname, and also the reason that David dropped his middle name at that point). Between 1948 and 1973 David and Ruth lived in Tel Aviv (where their son Hanoch Elroi was born in 1949), Tel Litvinski (later to become part of Ramat Gan) (where their daughter Pnina Givon (née Elroi) was born in 1952), Haifa, Kibbutz Kfar Hamaccabi, Kiryat Tivon (where their son Daniel Elroi was born in 1961), and Rehovot. In 1973 David, Ruth and Daniel took a sabbatical year in Copenhagen, Denmark, after which, in 1975 they emigrated to London, Great Britain. Around 1983 David and Ruth moved to Rockford, Illinois, and later to the Wakefield area of Rhode Island, where David passed away on May 26, 1993. Personal Life David was the son of a gentle and highly educated rabbi, Rabbi Harry Solomon Davidowitz, and of the highly intelligent and strong-willed Ida (Bloom) Davidowitz, daughter of a self-made magnate in the innovation of dentures, Samuel Simon Bloom. He showed an early aptitude in the arts, playing the piano, allegedly a child prodigy. David was also an avid photographer and bicyclist. One of his favorite cameras was his twin-lens Rolleiflex. Most of his bicycling occurred in his college years, when attending Harvard University. He not only commuted to school on his bike, but during summer breaks was known to bicycle to stay with relatives in Philadelphia, some 300 miles away. These talents and hobbies, however, were mostly set aside as he devoted his life to his true passion, practical scientific research in metallurgy, the chemistry of metals. Only in his later years, then living in Rhode Island and beginning to suffer from ill health, David rekindled some of his earlier – and new – interests. He listened to much classical music and obtained an electronic keyboard, trying to relearn the piano; he purchased an early Radio Shack computer and taught himself some basic programming; and started writing. Upon his death, he left two unpublished manuscripts (see listing below). The moves early in life from Philadelphia to Atlantic City and then Cleveland, following his father’s rabbinic career, and then at age 14 to Palestine, following his parents’ Zionist ideals, probably influenced a life-long wanderlust. In his lifetime, David ended up living in at least 15 towns and cities in four countries. His endless curiosity and unwillingness to follow accepted convention, probably also led to his dozen or more jobs in his career, including several efforts at starting business that would allow him to explore paths along which commercial enterprises were not at the time interested in pursuing. Career Educated in chemistry at two Ivy League schools, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, his early jobs were in medicine, first at Mount Sinai Hospital in Philadelphia during World War II, and later in the Israeli Medical Corps during Israel’s War of Independence. This was followed by a series of jobs at well-known employers in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s: Vulcan (steel and iron casting manufacturer near Haifa); Machtsavei Israel, now TALI (Israel’s national minerals and mining company) near Haifa; and Mekorot (Israel’s national water company) in Nazareth. He also spent some time assisting at his grandfather’s American Porcelain Tooth Factory near Tel Aviv, prior to that pioneering industrial concern’s eventual demise in the late 1950s. David was somewhat involved with academia, teaching the practice of paper chromatography at Bar Ilan University and Israel Institute of Standards; establishing the analytical lab at the Israel Metallurgical Institute, part of the Technion (Israel’s Institute of Technology) in Haifa; co-authoring a research paper related to the extraction of vanadium from sea cucumbers in the Proceedings and Technical Papers of the General Fisheries Council for the Mediterranean; and late in life, in 1986, receiving a grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to study at the University of Rhode Island whether noble metals can be used as tracers for determining whether haze in the polar atmosphere can be attributed to human activity in other parts of the planet. David’s focus, however, had always been on practical applications of research, and starting in the late 1960s David turned to a series of formal and self-employments focused on the recovery of various rare and precious metals out of scraps, an early entrepreneur in the field of industrial and commercial recycling. Initially, David set up shop in and around the expansive property the family occupied in Kiryat Tivon, a small, picturesque town between Haifa and Nazareth, within sight of Mount Carmel. He set himself up as the only recycler in Israel of dental amalgam, the expensive byproduct of dental fillings. Collecting scraps from dentists around Israel, he would reprocess them back into the silver and mercury they were created from, returning some to the dentists and selling the rest. He then set to collecting discarded X-Ray film from hospitals, refining the silver out of those. After his oldest two children had married and left home, David moved the family to Rehovot, close to the Weitzman Institute of Science. He did not become affiliated with the prestigious institution, but benefited from the availability of scientific equipment and research libraries when he set up another lab for recovering other precious metals. However, realizing that the small market in Israel probably could not support a commercial-scale plant, he sought employment in the Netherlands, and after a sabbatical year in Copenhagen, moved with his wife Ruth and youngest child Daniel, to London in Great Britain. Probably recovering from his last two scientifically-successful but economically-draining entrepreneurial enterprises, David worked for two chemical companies around London from 1975 until about 1980, including at BICC – British Insulated Callender’s Cables. The latter employer lost its zeal for extracting valuable but industrially insignificant amounts of rare metals from its own manufacturing wastes, and helped David launch Elroi Scientific Ltd in 1980 in the then-undeveloped East End Docklands of London. There he improved methods for recovering such toxic but valuable metals as Beryllium and Molybdenum from industrial wastes. Once again finding independent entrepreneurship to be more challenging that he had hoped, around 1984, David and Ruth moved to Rockford, Illinois, where David was employed by a local chemical firm. This was followed by a move to Rhode Island, where he found another chemical job and enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, where he attempted to obtain another MS degree, this time in Oceanography. Patents and Publications • In 1961, David co-authored a paper titled “On the possible use of the fouling ascidian Ciona intestinalis as a source of vanadium, cellulose and other products” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30890441_On_the_possible_use_of_the_fouling_ascidian_Ciona_intestinalis_as_a_source_of_vanadium_cellulose_and_other_products) • In 1982 David invented and then assigned to his friend, David Gaiman, a patent as a favor for a “Process for preparation of calcium-magnesium food supplement” https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2120519A/en?inventor=%22david+elroi%22&scholar&oq=%22david+elroi%22 • Unpublished biography of his father, Rabbi Harry Solomon Davidowitz. • Unpublished literary analysis of the similarities between Rudyard Kipling’s novel “Kim” and Mark Twain’s novel “Tom Sawyer”. Death David was a very light drinker, yet was afflicted with cirrhosis, a fatal liver disease. It is possible that despite extreme care in his career, over forty years of exposure to chemicals had taxed his liver, and he passed away in Wakefield, Rhode Island, in March of 1993, at age 73. Committed to science even in death, David donated his body to research, and his ashes were scattered in the bay across from the academic institution that invigorated him in his later years, the University of Rhode Island’s School of Oceanography in Narraganset. He is memorialized on that campus by a Cedar of Lebanon tree – his favorite tree – planted on the lawn of the Center of Atmospheric Chemistry Studies. About this Document This document was created by David Elroi’s son, Daniel Elroi, in Novmeber 2022.