Alexander Zarchin

Alexander Zarchin (Hebrew: אלכסנדר זרחין 1897–1988) was a Ukrainian-Israeli chemist and inventor.

[1] Born in Ukraine to a family of religious Zionists, as a young man, Zarchin studied industrial chemistry and specialized in metallurgy.

In 1934, he was arrested by the authorities for the crime of Zionism (he patented a chemical process using magnesium as "LCLA" an acronym for the phrase "L'ma'an Tzion Lo Achsheh" ("for the sake of Zion I won’t forget you") from the Book of Isaiah) and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Zarchin was then recruited into the Red Army, and by the end of World War II, he managed to reach West Germany, and from there he immigrated to Palestine in the summer of 1947.

[5] One of Alexander Zarchin's main contributions to the vacuum freezing vapor compression (VFVC) system was the incorporation of a compressor having a rotor with flexible unmachined blades[6] made of thin stainless strip.