Shlomo Breznitz

Shlomo Breznitz was born in 1936 in Bratislava

Breznitz was born in 1936 in Bratislava, then part of Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish family. During the Holocaust he and his sister were hidden in a Catholic orphanage, and his father was murdered in Auschwitz. He moved to Israel in 1949, and his mother and sister also came.

He studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a BA in 1960, an MA in 1962 and a PhD in 1965. He was the first person in Israel to receive a doctorate in psychology. In the IDF he served as an intelligence researcher in the Air Force.

His research dealt mainly with behavior under stress, and he advised the Israeli Air Force on stress from 1969 to 1971. At the University of Haifa he helped found a center for the study of psychological stress and served as rector from 1977 to 1979. He wrote books including the memoir Memory Fields, and in 1999 he left the university to found CogniFit, a brain fitness software company.

At the request of Ehud Olmert, he joined the Kadima list and was elected to the Knesset in 2006. He sat on several committees and founded the India-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group. He resigned in 2007 to return to CogniFit, lived in Haifa, and died in 2026.