Numismatist Day

My father, Joel Forman served three years in the Marine Corps, this led to his life membership in the First Marine Division Association, and he went on to graduate as an Engineer, with a B.S. in mathematics, an M.S. in computer science, and a second M.S. in evaluation science.

Upon retiring after 31 years as an aerospace and defense systems engineer, he faced the decision to change MINDSET and dedicate himself professionally to his lifelong hobby, collecting rare coins, i.e. Numismatic Appraiser.

Today he is a certified and accredited senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers, and a member of the trusts and estates section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association. For over 20 years, he has been an expert witness, working closely with the top auction houses in the United States.

Since June 1979, he has published 28 articles in Coin World and numerous articles in peer-reviewed publications. After considerable research, he wrote an academic article on the monetary systems that existed in the Nazi concentration camps. This peer-reviewed article was published in the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual and can be found here: http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp? Today, it is one of the papers used in the curriculum for the study of genocide. In addition to ongoing numismatic research, he has published several articles in the Jerusalem-based Jewish Bible Quarterly. These articles mathematically decode numbers in the Torah, explaining events, which occurred in Biblical times.

For years, he has served as a numismatic consultant to several national museums to develop coin collections.

The Forman family's own collections are on display in 14 different American national museums. Two museums, B'nai B'rith and the Karabakh Foundation, have dedicated sections to Joel and Linda Forman. They have also donated to two museums coins used in the national slave trade that took place under the British and American governments.

At the age of 81 he also dedicates his time to leaving a legacy to the environment, planting his family forest with already 10,000 fruit trees located in the Negev region of Israel, very close to the biblical city of Beer Sheva.