Scienceאבנר פלק

Avner Falk

Avner Falk is an Israeli clinical psychologist and author who has written psychoanalytic studies of Jewish and Israeli leaders, Jewish history and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

born 1943Psychoanalytic biographies of Israeli leadersPsychoanalytic study of the Arab-Israeli conflictRecovering his grandfather's Torah relic

Born: 2 April 1943, Mandatory Palestine
Occupation: psychologist, non-fiction writer, psychotherapist, writer
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Washington University in St. Louis

Avner Falk was born in 1943 in Mandatory Palestine

Avner Falk was born on April 2, 1943, in Petah Tikva and grew up in Tel Aviv. He finished Ironi Alef High School in Tel Aviv in 1960. His maternal family came from Zgierz in Poland.

He studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1960 to 1966. He then studied clinical psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and earned his Ph.D. in 1970.

He served in the IDF as a mental health officer, treating soldiers with combat stress. He left the army with the rank of captain.

Falk returned to Israel in 1971 and worked in Jerusalem as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. He wrote psychoanalytic biographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Napoleon, Barack Obama and S. Y. Agnon. He also wrote books on antisemitism, Islamic terrorism and the Crusades.

In 2010 he learned that a museum in Tübingen held a wooden disc from a Torah scroll his grandfather had given to a synagogue in Zgierz. In 2011 the mayor of Tübingen handed the relic to him in a public ceremony. He has since been writing a book on how the relic reached a local theologian.