Avshalom Elitzur

Avshalom Elitzur was born in 1957 in Iran

Elitzur was born in Kerman, Iran, to a religious Jewish family. When he was 2, the family moved to Israel, stayed briefly in Yavne and then settled in Rehovot.

He studied at a yeshiva high school in Bat Yam and as a teenager began working in a laboratory at the Weizmann Institute. He had no matriculation certificate or academic degree. On the recommendation of Yakir Aharonov, he was admitted to doctoral studies in physics at Tel Aviv University and completed his PhD in 1999.

In 1987 he published a book of psychoanalytic readings of the Bible and Judaism. In 1993 he and Lev Vaidman devised a quantum mechanics experiment named after them. He advised at the Weizmann Institute and taught at Bar-Ilan University from 1999, where he was a senior lecturer from 2001 to 2006 before being dismissed ahead of tenure.

He was a visiting professor in Mumbai, Grenoble and at Chapman University in California. He edited natural sciences for the Hebrew Encyclopedia, founded the Iyar research institute and chairs a group working for the immigration of the Falash Mura. In 2010 he received the Noetic Medal of Consciousness and Brain Research.