Business and technologyשלמה אקשטיין

Shlomo Eckstein

Shlomo Eckstein was an Israeli economist who founded the Department of Economics at Bar-Ilan University and served as its president from 1992 to 1996.

1929 to 2020Founding Bar-Ilan's economics departmentPresident of Bar-Ilan UniversityResearch on Latin American agrarian reform

Born: 1 November 1929, Wiesbaden
Died: 12 January 2020
Occupation: economist, university teacher
Education: Harvard University

Shlomo Eckstein was born in 1929 in Wiesbaden

Eckstein was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to Markus and Augusta Eckstein. Before World War II his family left Germany, and he grew up in Mexico. There he was a youth leader in the Bnei Akiva movement.

He received a degree in economics from the National University of Mexico in 1957. He earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 1964, with a dissertation on collective farming in Mexico.

He moved to Israel and founded the Department of Economics at Bar-Ilan University, which he chaired in the 1960s. In 1972 he led a World Bank team that studied land reforms in Latin America. He also chaired a public committee on the Seas Canal project and sat on national councils for higher education and for research and development.

He was rector of Bar-Ilan University from 1978 to 1982 and its president from 1992 to 1996. Later he chaired Retorno, a center for the prevention and treatment of addiction. He was married to Leah, and they had 3 children.