David Bannett (1921-2022) *100

was an American-Israeli electronics engineer, a pioneer in radar technologies in the Israel Air Force, a "purchase" person in the Haganah forces in the US, one of the first engineers in the Israeli electronics industry in the country's first years, and the inventor of Shabbat elevators. Bannett was the first lecturer of electronics in the Department of Physics at Bar Ilan University and the Jerusalem College of Technology and is one of the founders of the Beit Hazon neighborhood in Kfar Haroeh. David Rephael ("Daniel") Bannett was born in New York, to William and Esther (Tack) Bannett, both born in the US. He learned at a public school and in the afternoons studied at a Talmud Torah. When he reached Bar Mitzvah, he began to keep mitzvot (Jewish laws). In 1937, he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School at age 16 and studied mathematics, physics and engineering at the City College of New York. During World War II he worked in the US army as a radar systems instructor, a technology that was classified and innovative at that time. Before the 1947–1949 Palestine war, he was recruited to “purchasing” for the Haganah..

Bannett immigrated to Israel in 1949 with his two children and wife, Esther Chana, who united with her family in Israel. Esther Chana is the daughter of Sarah Malka, president of the United Mizrachi Women in Washington Heights, and Shemaryahu Cohen Margolis, from the Old Yishuv in Jerusalem, who escaped to the US with the outbreak of World War I and headed the World Mizrachi Movement there. He later became one of the heads of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Israel and a Yakir Yerushalayim.