Avner Falk - Biography

Biography

Avner Falk studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1960–1966) and at Washington University in St. Louis (1966–1970). He has published psychoanalytic biographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Napoleon and Barack Obama. In 2005,his book Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2004) won the Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association's Choice magazine.

In July 2010 Dr. Falk was contacted by Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, a Holocaust historian and journalist in the German university town of Tübingen, whose city government had just published the existence in its museum of a wooden Torah disc from Zgierz, the hometown of Falk's maternal family, which had been in its possession since 1994. It turned out that the disc was a relic from a Torah scroll that Falk's Polish-Jewish maternal grandfather, Jozef Cwi Szpiro (1880-1941), had donated to his Zgierz synagogue in 1927 in memory of his deceased parents, and that some time after 1939 came into the possession of Otto Michel (1903-1993), a well-known Tübingen university theologian, a former Nazi and SA member, who after the Second World War and the Holocaust became a Jewish Studies pioneer in Tübingen, and whose widow had given it to the city museum. Since then, Dr. Falk has been writing a psychohistorical book, which has also become a detective story, about when and how this relic of his grandfather's Torah scroll came into Michel's possession. Michel himself had said nothing about his Nazi past in his autobiography of 1989 and had apparently told no one about how he had come by the wooden Torah disc. In November 2011 Dr. Falk received this relic of his grandfather's Torah scroll from the mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer (born 1971), in a public ceremony in Tübingen's city hall, at which Falk delivered a German-language lecture on his findings entitled Die Verneinung der Vergangenheit: Die Geschichte einer Thorarolle (The Denial of the Past: The Story of a Torah Scroll). He continues his research for this book in the face of considerable resistance from some German archives.