Tuvia Friling

Tuvia Friling was born in 1953 in Bârlad

Friling was born in Beer Sheba in 1953. His parents came to Israel from Bârlad, Romania, in 1951 with his older brother and two sisters, and first lived in a transit camp in Beer Sheba. In 1967 he began studying at the May Boyer boarding school for gifted students in Jerusalem.

He was drafted in 1971 into the 890 Paratroopers Battalion and later served as an officer in the Golani Brigade. He fought on Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and ended his reserve service as a major.

He earned a bachelor's degree in Jewish and general history at Ben-Gurion University in 1979 and taught history at a Beer Sheba high school until 1983. At the Hebrew University he completed a master's degree in 1984 and a doctorate in 1991 on David Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, both supervised by Yehuda Bauer.

From 1983 to 1991 he was a researcher and head of the archive at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute, and from 1993 to 2001 he headed the Ben-Gurion institutes at Sde Boker, where he helped create a computerized Ben-Gurion archive. As State Archivist from 2001 to 2004 he launched a plan to upgrade Israel's archive system. In 2003 and 2004 he was a vice chair of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania.

He taught at Ben-Gurion University from 1977 until he retired in 2021.