Yehuda Eyal

Yehuda Eyal was born in 1939 in Jerusalem

Yehuda Eyal was born in Jerusalem in 1939. His parents moved to Netanya when he was an infant, and he grew up there, attending the Tachkemoni elementary school, the Bar-Ilan high school and the Bnei Akiva youth movement. His brother is the geologist Moshe Eyal.

He served in the 50th Nahal paratroop battalion and later fought as a reservist in the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War. After his regular service he moved to Kibbutz Sa'ad, where he married Tova Ben-Zeev in 1964. He later served as the kibbutz internal secretary from 1982 to 1984.

He earned a bachelor's degree in geology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965 and a master's degree in 1967, both with honors. His doctorate, supervised by Yaakov Ben-Tor, studied the Precambrian block in the Wadi Tweiba and Bir Swair area of Sinai.

His research covered the structural geology of Israel, stress fields linked to the Syrian Arc and the Dead Sea Rift, clastic dikes and the uplift of Mount Hermon. Sinai and the Eilat mountains were central to his work. In 2010 he chaired the Israel Prize committee for earth sciences.

In October 2000 he moved to Meitar. In 2019 Ben-Gurion University held a study day in his honor. He died in 2022.