Dov Frohman

Dov Frohman (Hebrew: דב פרוהמן, also known as Dov Frohman-Bentchkowsky; born March 28, 1939) is an Israeli electrical engineer and business executive. A former vice president of Intel Corporation, he is the inventor of the erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM) and the founder and first general manager of Intel Israel, Intel’s extensive operations in Israel. He is also the author (with Robert Howard) of Leadership the Hard Way (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

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 North Brabant near the Belgian border. The Van Tilborghs hid Frohman for the duration of the war. His parents died in the Holocaust