Chronicle of Philanthropy Spotlights $25 Million Guzik Gift
Chronicle of Philanthropy Spotlights $25 Million Guzik Gift
March 8, 2021
The Chronicle of Philanthropy — Americans for Ben-Gurion University has received the second largest single gift commitment in its history: $25 million from Silicon Valley philanthropist and entrepreneur Nahum Guzik. The generous gift is for BGU’s new Guzik Cultural Center, a performing-arts complex on the university’s new north campus, in Beer-Sheva, Israel. The center will feature a large music hall and auditorium, an art exhibition area, and a visitors’ center.
Nahum Guzik is the founder and president of Guzik Technical Enterprises, a Mountain View, Calif., company that manufactures data acquisition, digital-signal processing, and data-streaming solutions for electronic test and measurement, automatic test equipment, and original equipment manufacturer applications.
An engineer from Odessa, Ukraine, Guzik worked on defense research in Siberia and Novosibirsk, and in Moscow on the development of the data-recording system used by the space mission Vostok 2, when Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov became the second human to orbit Earth, in August 1961.
He emigrated to Israel in 1972 and then to the United States in 1973. Once here, Guzik worked for Ampex and then Memorex before starting his company in 1982.