Semion Kizhner, a Ukrainian-born mathematician, cyberneticist and aerospace engineer who survived a concentration camp as a toddler and later built a distinguished career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, died on Nov. 22 at 85.
His wife, Sophia Kizhner, said Kizhner’s life was shaped by war, persecution, antisemitism and a drive for achievement. “We came from a country where antisemitism meant he could not achieve his dream to work in the space industry. In this country, he became what he was meant to be,” she said.
Born on Sept. 3, 1940, in Hotin, in western Ukraine, Kizhner was 9 months old when his father, Gershon Kizhner, an editor at a major newspaper in Chernovtzy, was arrested by Soviet secret police and disappeared. Only after the Kizhners immigrated to the United States did a former prisoner confirm that Gershon had died in a Soviet labor camp. “From 9 months old, my husband lived without a father,” Sophia Kizhner said.
At age 1, Semion and his mother, Molka Leah Alexandrovich, were forced on foot with relatives to Balta, a Romanian-run concentration camp. They remained until liberated by the Red Army when Semion was 4 years old. Returning home, the family found their house and orchard seized by neighbors “who were upset that my husband and his family survived,” Sophia Kizhner said. Soviet soldiers intervened, but life afterward was marked by hunger and antisemitism.
Even in those years, Kizhner excelled academically. But opportunities for Jews were limited. For three years, he traveled to Moscow to apply to the elite Bauman Moscow State Technical Institute, passing entrance exams with top marks, only to be rejected because he was Jewish.
A turning point came when the rector of Gorky State University invited rejected Jewish applicants to study there. Kizhner enrolled in mathematics and cybernetics, training under prominent scholars. After graduating, he joined a research institute in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), conducting work in advanced mathematics and computer science.
In 1968, he met Sophia at the institute where they both worked during International Women’s Day. Before a party, she sat in a hall of 400 empty chairs, reading a book, when Semion took the seat beside her.
“He told me he had been trying to find a way to meet me,” she said. After the ceremony, they stood talking for four hours about literature and poetry. The next morning, Kizhner appeared outside her home at 7 a.m. to walk her to work. “He came every morning for four months,” she said. They married on July 8, 1968.
They lived in a small apartment in the home of Sophia Kizhner’s grandfather, where their first child, Helen, was born in 1969.
The stability they built at home contrasted with the realities facing Jews in the Soviet Union. The Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 directly intensified state-sponsored antisemitism. By the early 1970s, the Kizhners’ future in the Soviet Union was untenable. As the child of a man executed in the gulag, Kizhner was blacklisted. “It was impossible for a Jew to find a job,” his wife said. The decision to emigrate was dangerous.
Applying for exit visas brought retaliation. “They traumatized Semion at work every single day,” she said. When the institute director told him to stop coming to work, Kizhner replied, “But I need to support my family.”
After four months, the family received permission to leave — with only 24 days to depart. They were allowed to take only $200. Before leaving, they were required to pay to have their citizenship revoked.
The family spent four and a half months in an unheated apartment near Rome before arriving in Baltimore on April 23, 1975.
Without documents — the Soviet government had confiscated them — Kizhner underwent oral academic evaluations. At Johns Hopkins University, four mathematics professors spent a day questioning him. Their evaluation concluded he could teach upper-level mathematics at any American university once his spoken English improved.
A Baltimore Jewish community advocate, Stuart Stiller, helped him secure his first American job at U.S. Fidelity and Guaranty Company, where he worked five years and designed computer systems used for decades. Meanwhile, the couple’s son, Gregory, was born in 1979.
Kashner later joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he became known for solving complex problems and guiding projects. He mentored graduate students, military officers and engineers, helping many finish doctoral dissertations. “He really took me under his wing,” said Scott Leszczynski, who met Kizhner as a graduate student in the mid-1990s. “He gave me the foundation for my career.”
Kizhner celebrated the birth of a grandchild, Ray, in 1995. Twenty-two years later, he would retire from NASA, leaving behind a long record of technical achievement and mentorship.
Colleagues remembered a blend of brilliance and warmth. Ron Shiri, a NASA proposal manager who carpooled with Kizhner to Greenbelt for more than a decade, described him as “joyful, humorous and incredibly intellectual.” He added, “You always came away learning something.”
NASA awarded Kizhner three civilian medals for his contributions. He also supervised teams preparing space shuttle payloads, insisting on rigorous preparation. “They didn’t like working so hard,” Sophia said, “but afterward they thanked him because their experiments never failed.”
Beyond his scientific life, Kizhner wrote poetry. He inherited the talent from his father, who published a book in 1935. That volume — carried out of the Soviet Union in the family’s luggage — is now housed in the Holocaust and genocide studies archive at Ohio State University.
Speakers at Kizhner’s funeral recalled his “incredible imagination,” “the world he carried within his mind,” and his ability to translate complex ideas into poetry and mentoring.
Sophia said her husband viewed the United States with deep gratitude. “We have been in this blessed country for 50 years,” she said. “Becoming American citizens 45 years ago was one of our greatest accomplishments.”
Her voice broke when she reflected on his legacy. “I want people to know about my husband,” she said. “Not just what he survived, but what he became.”
Ellen Braunstein is a freelance writer.
I think I may have a new hero? Thank you for the wondeful obit.
What a heroic life he led. May his memory be a blessing.