Efraim Margolin
Efraim Margolin is a prominent Israeli-American businessman and philanthropist, founder of Margolin Consultants, one of the leading employment and Merger and Acquisitions Companies in New York City. He is a native of Ukraine escaping pogroms and murders and immigrated to Palestine when he was a small child. Growing up with a father who was a local leader of the Haganah Jewish Underground Militia fighting off Arab riots, he became one of the leading young engineers during World War II working for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran and later, as Manager in Baharien Island constructing an airport for the British Air Force. Later he came to America for advanced engineering studies at Columbia University marrying his American sweetheart and ended up serving as a secret agent for the Mossad, the Israeli Undercover Agency, outfitting torpedo boats for the Israeli Navy. After the War of Independence, he was in charge of building the New City of Beer Sheva in the Negev Desert.
Due to unexpected illness of his pregnant wife Florence, he returned to New York with no financial support for his wife and their new born son. Starting from scratch, his ingenuity and perseverance following many failures, he managed to build a striving enterprise and became active in many organizations promoting trade and cultural exchanges with Israel. He and Florence are founders of the City of Tel Aviv Foundation, City of Eilat, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, American Israeli Opera, The Boston Opera and founding benefactors of 40,000 trees in the Jewish National Fund "Margolin Peace Forest" in Keriat Gat between Jerusalem and Beer Sheva. They live in Manhattan but return to Israel frequently.
AN INTRODUCTION TO "Building Dreams: My Heart Belongs to Israel"
- by David Chanoff, Co-author of "Warrior" by Ariel Sharon
There are several excellent reasons to read Efraim Margolin’s evocative and inspirational memoir, Building Dreams. For those interested in how early Jewish immigrants to Palestine survived and built lives from their initial impoverished and tenuous beginnings, Margolin paints a picture from a somewhat unusual perspective. We are used to reading accounts of what it was like to grow up on pre-Independence War kibbutzim and moshavim, of farmers working their fields with one hand on a plough the other holding a rifle. But Margolin spent his early years in a tiny, struggling town just outside Jerusalem. It was a gritty, barebones life, and he describes it in an authentic, down to earth voice, with humor, wonder, and an engaging simplicity that conveys the feel of that experience.
Margolin was twenty-eight when the War of Independence began, and here too he gives us a different perspective. By then he was an experienced mechanic (he had attended a technical high school in Haifa) and had advanced to managing projects for an Israeli construction company. Eager to continue his education, his company had agreed to underwrite an engineering degree at Columbia University. His studies were interrupted, though, when the war started and he was recruited by the forerunner of the Mossad to help prepare military equipment and smuggle it from the United States to Israel. That dimension of Israel’s war effort is relatively unknown, and Margolin gives us a first hand account of some of the secret operations that helped arm the Jewish forces battling for the Yishuv’s life against five Arab armies.
Back in Israel after the war, Margolin was placed in charge of construction for the new city of Beersheba. There he pioneered building precast concrete homes which facilitated the quick development of a vital town in the middle of the desert.
Margolin’s life intersected with crucial events in Israel’s early life. Building Dreams provides a welcome and out of the ordinary addition to the existing literature. But the heart of the book, to my mind, lies elsewhere. Like every other memoirist, Efraim Margolin’s true subject is himself. And he is most definitely a character worth spending time with.
In 1951, with Margolin’s American wife experiencing a difficult pregnancy in an era of inadequate Israeli medical facilities, the family moved to New York. Having been a highly successful construction boss, Margolin now found himself living in his parents-in-law’s small apartment, without a job, and without enough English language fluency to easily find one. There are libraries full of American Horatio Alger stories, but among all there Margolin’s struggle for success has something special about it. This man, we come to understand, is driven by an utterly irrepressible spirit. He embodies the courage, resourcefulness, and determination we expect from our American heroes. But those character traits are accompanied by such plain, unaffected modesty that, after reading this book, we are left with the impression that we have been in the presence of someone it has been important for us to know.
