Shimon Bar-Efrat

Shimon Bar-Efrat was born in 1929 in Arnhem

Shimon Bar-Efrat was born in 1929 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, with the family name Bauernfreund. After the Nazis invaded in 1940, his father's employer, a member of the underground, found the family a hiding place. The family hid for two and a half years and survived the Holocaust.

After the war he studied at the seminary for teachers and rabbis in Amsterdam, and then spent half a year studying Hebrew and Judaism in Manchester. In 1950 he moved to Israel alone and studied Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His teachers included Isaac Leo Seeligmann, Umberto Cassuto and Yehezkel Kaufmann.

After his first degree he taught Bible in Beersheba for 4 years, as a kind of national service in place of the army. In 1953 he married Leah, and they had 2 children. In 1960 he began teaching at the Hebrew University Secondary School in Jerusalem, where he taught for 30 years.

He wrote his doctorate under Meir Weiss, using a literary approach to the Bible. It became the book Narrative Art in the Bible, published in 1979 and translated into English, Spanish, German and Chinese. In 1996 he published a commentary on the Book of Samuel.

After retiring he volunteered as a guide at the Tower of David Museum and held a weekly Bible study group at home. From 2007 he wrote regularly for a Dutch-language journal of Dutch immigrants. He died in 2010.