Wartime Childhood
Frohman was born in March 1939 in Amsterdam, five months before the start of World War II. His parents were Abraham and Feijga Frohman, Polish Jews who had emigrated to the Netherlands in the early 1930s to escape rising anti-Semitism in Poland. In 1942, after the German invasion of the Low Countries and as the Nazi grip on Holland’s Jewish community tightened, his parents decided to give their child to acquaintances in the Dutch resistance who placed him with the Van Tilborghs, an orthodox Christian farming family that lived in the village of Sprang Capelle in the region of Noord-Brabant near the Belgian border. The Van Tilborghs hid Frohman for the duration of the war. His parents died in the Holocaust.
Located by relatives in Palestine after the war, Frohman spent a few years in orphanages for Jewish children whose parents had died in the war, before emigrating to Israel in 1949 after the founding of the Jewish state. Adopted by relatives, he grew up in Tel Aviv, served in the Israeli army, and in 1959, enrolled at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering.
Read more about this topic: Dov Frohman
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