Chaim Katzman, founder and CEO of Gazit Globe, an international real estate company that specializes in the development and management of shopping centers, with operations in the United States, Canada, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Brazil and Israel.
Chaim Katzman was born and raised in Tel Aviv and holds an LLB from the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. In addition to his business operations, Chaim is considered a leader and opinion-maker in the public arena and is active in the realm of philanthropy. Among others, he has established the Gazit Globe Institute of Real Estate at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, invests in the support of education in the periphery, in art and cultural institutions and more.
Chaim Katzman, together with his wife, the late Dr. Shulamit Katzman, founded the Katzman Family Foundation that supports organizations in the fields of education, healthcare and art and leads the commemoration of the late Dr. Shulamit Katzman. The Katzman Family Foundation has contributed to the establishment of a rehabilitation day-care center in Kiryat Malachi and of a day-care center in Yerucham, both named “Beit Shulamit”.
Partaking in the operation of the Katzman Family Foundation, alongside Chaim, are his daughters Abigail, Bat-Ami and Evrona, his sons-in-law, Zvi Grodon and Max Dixon, and his wife, Shelly Katzman.
In a newspaper interview, Chaim said that:
“The most difficult thing,” he recalls, “was to lead my daughter to the Chuppah alone. This was my constant nightmare. And on that day, on the one hand the daughter is getting married, and she’s happy, and I can’t walk around with a gloomy face. But she is wearing her mother’s dress, and her jewelry, and also looks like her, and is being married by the same rabbi who married us”. The devastating phone call informing him of her illness, Chaim received while en-route to Israel. “The moment of notification is unlike anything I had experienced. It teaches you how life can change in a single moment, never to be the same again.”
