Yehuda Elkana

Yehuda Elkana was born in 1934 in Subotica

Elkana was born in Subotica, Yugoslavia, in 1934. In 1944 he and his parents were sent to Auschwitz, and the family was later moved to Austria as forced laborers. He immigrated to Israel in 1948 and lived at Kibbutz HaZore'a.

The kibbutz helped him get a scholarship to the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. He studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1955 and taught at Gymnasia Rehavia during his master's studies. He earned a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1968 with a thesis on the emergence of the energy concept.

After teaching at Harvard, he chaired the history and philosophy of science department at the Hebrew University and directed the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute until 1993. He directed the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University from 1981 to 1991 and founded the university's Interdisciplinary Program for gifted students in 1985. He also co-founded and edited the journal Science in Context.

From 1995 to 1999 he was a professor at ETH Zurich. He then led the Central European University in Budapest until 2009. In 1988 he published a newspaper article in Haaretz titled In Praise of Forgetting, which caused public debate about Holocaust remembrance in Israel.

In his last years he worked on reforming university curricula, and his final book appeared in October 2012. He was married to Dr. Yehudit Elkana and had 4 children. He died in 2012 and was buried at Kibbutz Mishmar HaNegev.