Morris Kahn was born in March 1930 in Benoni, South Africa, the eldest child of Philip and Beattie Kahn. He was an active member of the Zionist youth group, Habonim.
In 1956, Kahn moved from South Africa to Israel with his wife, Jacqueline Maloon, and their two sons, Benjamin and David.
His first major success began with the establishment of the Golden Pages in Israel in 1968, which led to the co-founding of Amdocs in 1982, together with Shmuel and Tzvi Meitar. Amdocs provides customer relationship management and billing software for big telecommunications firms. The company, which is traded on NASDAQ (revenue in fiscal 2015: $3.6 billion) currently serves more than 300 clients in more than 90 countries, and has about 26,000 employees.
In 1978 Kahn and Shmuel Meitar founded the Aurec Group, an Israeli-based private equity firm which started with Investments in the cable and Telecom sectors. This led to the installation of a fiber optic cable from Israel to Italy, which connected Israel to the rest of the world.
Aurec also owns Golden Channels, Israel's first cable company, founded in 1989 and Golden Lines, Israel's first international communications company, founded in 1996.
In 1997 the Aurec Group acquired 50% of Netcom, the launch of AIG Golden Insurance and Alpha Visa-Card.
Kahn founded Zalul in 1999, a non-profit foundation which cleans bodies of water in Israel.
Kahn has two sons, David and Benjamin, a marine Biologist, who was a Time Magazine hero for his work on the environment. He was married to his late wife, Jacqueline, until the time of her death in 2011. He lives in Beit Yanai, north of Tel Aviv.
In 2014, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Telfed (the South African Zionist Federation, Israel).
In October, 2016 Kahn received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Israel-USA Chamber of Commerce for his work promoting economic relations between Israel and the USA, with such Business partnerships as Amdocs and AIG-Israel.
Founded by Morris Kahn, SpaceIL is the first to sign a launch agreement for a private moon mission on the SpaceX Falcon 9 Launcher. SpaceIL hopes to land an Israeli spacecraft on the moon later in the year 2017.
The Morris Kahn Initiative is a $4 million program to help develop pioneering cancer research at Tel Aviv University. The initiative’s aim is to develop 3D cancer modeling of live cancer tumors.
