Gabriel Barkay

Gabriel Barkay was born in 1944 in Budapest Ghetto

Barkay was born Gábor Breslauer in Budapest on 20 June 1944. He and his mother escaped a death march when Soviet troops liberated the city in January 1945, and his father survived a camp in Ukraine. The family changed its name and moved to Israel in 1950.

He finished the Hebrew Gymnasium Rehavia in 1962. He studied archaeology, geography and comparative religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then moved to Tel Aviv University in 1970. His doctorate, supervised by David Ussishkin, dealt with Jerusalem's surroundings in the late Iron Age.

Barkay took part in many digs, including 15 years at Lachish. From 1975 he dug at Ketef Hinnom, where in 1979 he found two small silver scrolls with the priestly blessing from the Book of Numbers, dated to the 7th century BCE. He taught at Tel Aviv University from 1970 to 1997, at Bar-Ilan University from 1998 to 2011, and at other schools.

In 2005 he started the Temple Mount Sifting Project to study soil removed from the Temple Mount without archaeological supervision. He received the Jerusalem Prize for Archaeology in 1996 and the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism in 2014. He died on 11 January 2026.