Tag: Sylvan Adams

Israelis heading to the moon

Left to right: Inbal Krayes, Morris Kahn, Sylvan Adams and Dr. Ido Anteby at the Israel Aerospace Industries facility in Yehud, Israel. (photo from SpaceIL)

On Nov. 19, SpaceIL announced that Canadian billionaire and businessman Sylvan Adams, who brought the Giro d’Italia Big Start cycling race to Israel this year, joined the project to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon and contributed $5 million to the organization.

Adams announced his contribution as part of a special tour that took place at the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) MBT Space facility in Yehud, where the spacecraft is being assembled. Also attending the tour were SpaceIL’s president Morris Kahn, SpaceIL chief executive officer Dr. Ido Anteby and other senior IAI officials, including IAI vice-president of space operations Inbal Krayes.

Adams, who was celebrating his 60th birthday, said at the event that “this contribution to strengthening the Israeli space program, and encouraging education for excellence and innovation among the younger generation in Israel, is the best gift I could have asked for.”

He added: “I believe that sending the first Israeli spacecraft to the moon will inspire Israeli schoolchildren to take up STEM studies and think about space exploration, and especially to believe that everything is possible.”

Since SpaceIL’s establishment in 2011, the mission of landing an Israeli spacecraft on the moon has become a national project embodying educational values. Adams joins a group of donors who have contributed to the project, including Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Sammy Sagol, Lynn Schusterman, Steven Grand and others.

Kahn, a businessman and philanthropist, took it upon himself to lead the project and bring it to its completion, donating $27 million and serving as the project’s president. He regards its completion as his personal mission.

“We are in the final stretch,” said Kahn, “and I believe that his [Adams] joining will help us raise the remaining money to complete our ambitious mission.”

“The teams of SpaceIL and IAI are making great progress in a series of tests and trials being carried out at IAI’s space facility,” Anteby said. “At the same time, we are stepping up activities to promote scientific and technological education in the state of Israel, ahead of launch.”

In October, SpaceIL and the Israeli Space Agency announced a collaboration with NASA that would enable SpaceIL to improve its ability to track and communicate with the spacecraft before, during and after landing on the moon.

IAI, which is the home of Israel’s space activity, has been a full partner in this project from its inception. Over the years, additional partners from Israel’s private sector, the Israeli government and from academia have joined as well. The most prominent among these are the Weizmann Institute of Science; Israel Space Agency; the Ministry of Science, Technology and Space; the Israeli telecom firm Bezeq, and others.

The same week of Adams’ donation, Ofir Akunis, Israel’s minister of science, technology and space, visited the IAI facility where the spacecraft is being built, after the ministry announced an additional NIS 7.5 million ($2.66 million Cdn) in support for the project.

“The moon mission is one of great national pride. There is a short time before the spacecraft’s launch, and I have no doubt all Israelis will feel great joy when the spacecraft blasts off,” Akunis said. “I am a great believer that the landing will be one of the highlights in the history of the state of Israel, and the educational activity we are doing around the mission sets the foundation for engineers who will work in the field of space and science in the next decade.”

SpaceIL was the only Israeli contestant in the international Google Lunar XPRIZE competition. To win the first prize of $20 million, the participants were required to land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon. The competition ended officially with no winner on March 31, when Google announced that it would no longer sponsor the competition.

After succeeding in raising the critical funds to continue its activity, SpaceIL announced that it was determined to continue on its mission and to launch its spacecraft, regardless of the competition. Concurrently, the nonprofit is continuing its efforts to raise the funds necessary to complete this mission.

SpaceIL aims to set in motion an “Apollo effect” in Israel: to encourage the next generation of Israeli children to choose to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and to change their perception of these subjects; to generate a sense of capability, and to allow them to dream big dreams even in a small country.

Giro d’Italia’s “Big Start” in Israel

Sylvan Adams, 58, is funding the construction of the Middle East’s first Olympic velodrome, slated to open in Tel Aviv in May 2018. (photo from margolin-bros.com/en/project/Velodrom)

In Europe, the Giro d’Italia bicycle race ranks in status with baseball’s World Series or hockey’s Stanley Cup. Since the beloved Italian sports extravaganza’s initial race in 1909, the multi-stage race has never started outside Europe – until now. Next May, the annual event’s starting flag will be waved in the Holy City, thanks in big part to Sylvan Adams – the Montreal billionaire now living in Tel Aviv who himself is a competitive bicycle racer.

Adams, 58, is funding the construction of the Middle East’s first Olympic velodrome, slated to open in Tel Aviv in May 2018, in time for the Israel-based initial part of the 23-day Giro d’Italia. The Israeli team is all but guaranteed to receive one of four wildcard invitations for the race.

The bike-racing stadium, called simply the Velodrome, is part of the National Sports Centre being built by the Tel Aviv Foundation, by Mazor-First Architects. Located on Bechor Shitrit Street in the Hadar Yosef neighbourhood, the complex will gentrify a once-impoverished area. Budgeted at $11 million, the 7,100-square-metre biking facility will be jointly owned by the Olympic Committee of Israel and the Tel Aviv Municipality.

Adams, who made aliyah in December 2015, is honorary president of the organizing committee of the race’s “Big Start” in Jerusalem.

The three-week Giro is widely considered the most beautiful of cycling’s three Grand Tours, ahead of the sporting leviathan of the Tour de France and Spain’s lower-key Vuelta a España. Ministers from Israel and Italy met at Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel in September to sign an agreement that the opening three stages of next year’s Giro will be held in Israel.

Like the other Grand Tours, the modern editions of the Giro d’Italia normally consist of 21 daylong segments (stages) over a 23-day period that includes two rest days. All of the stages are timed to the finish, each stage’s time added to the previous. The rider with the lowest total time is the leader of the race and gets to don the coveted pink jersey, called maglia rosa, worn by the leader of the general classification.

Adams, who has until recently been publicity shy, today lives in a penthouse overlooking the Mediterranean and Tel Aviv’s sea-side bicycle path. A two-time world outdoor cycling champion in his age category, his most recent title was won at the World Masters Championship, held in Manchester, England, in November 2015. Adams, who began cycling competitively more than two decades ago, is a six-time Canadian and 15-time Quebec champion. He won four gold medals at two Pan-American meets, and a total of five golds at the 2009 and 2013 Maccabiah Games.

His dream is to turn Tel Aviv into “the Amsterdam of the Middle East,” i.e. a city as bike-friendly as the Dutch capital. He believes something similar can be done in Tel Aviv, where traffic congestion and a parking shortage are reaching a crisis, as more and more motorists come in from “satellite” cities.

“Petach Tikva, for example, is eight kilometres from the heart of Tel Aviv. That can take an hour to drive some mornings. By cycling, it is 20 to 30 minutes,” he said.

Adams first visited Israel nearly four decades ago. He and his wife of 33 years, Margaret, a native of London, England, met while volunteering on a kibbutz.

Now retired, Adams has given up his involvement with the family business, Iberville Developments Ltd., the real estate giant founded after the Second World War by his father, Marcel Adams, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor. The younger Adams was its chief executive officer and his son Josh, one of his four children, is now running the company, one of the largest owners of commercial properties in Quebec.

Gil Zohar is a journalist based in Jerusalem.