Dan Bar-On

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Dan Bar-On ( Hebrew דן בר-און; * 1938 in Haifa ; † September 4, 2008 in Tel Aviv ) was an Israeli psychologist , therapist , Holocaust and peace researcher .

biography

Bar-On was born in 1938 in the port city of Haifa in the then British Mandate Palestine as the son of German-Jewish parents from Hamburg. He lived in Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev for 25 years , including as a farmer and educator.

He first studied agriculture, then psychology and received a Master of Arts in psychology in 1975 . He then worked in the kibbutz hospital, where he specialized in therapy and Holocaust research and interviewed children of Holocaust survivors . In 1981 he completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , and in 1983 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a post-doctoral student on a Fulbright scholarship .

In 1985 he traveled to Germany and spoke to the children of Nazi perpetrators. This resulted in the book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich , published in English in 1989 , which appeared in German as Die Last des Schweigens in 1993 and has also been translated into Hebrew, French and Japanese. In 1992 Bar-On initiated the discussion group “To Reflect and Trust” between perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust, to which Martin Bormann junior also belonged.

He has published several books on dialogue in conflict situations and has worked for understanding in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .

From 2006 to 2008, with the support of the Körber Foundation, he led the “Dan Bar-On Dialogue Training - Storytelling in Conflict” in order to train mediators in the field of intercultural dialogue work in different parts of the world. Bar-On was Professor of Psychology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva until 2007 . In 1998 and 2002/3 he held the Ida E. Chair for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton College in New Jersey , where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1999. In 1996 he received the David Lopatie Chair for Post-Holocaust Psychological Studies . With the Palestinian educator and sociologist Sami Adwan, he founded and directed PRIME, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East , based in Bait Jala, from 1998 onwards . Bar-On and Adwan worked with six Israeli and six Palestinian teachers each to develop a history book that was supposed to present Israeli-Palestinian history in an acceptable way for both sides, so that one could learn from one another, with the Israeli view in one column and the Palestinian view in another the event was depicted.

For the US spring semester 2007, Bar-On received, together with Sami Adwan, a Fulbright scholarship at Monmouth University in New Jersey . Bar-On died on September 4, 2008 at the age of 69 as a result of serious cancer in Tel Aviv.

Bar-On was married and had four children.

Awards

Works (selection)

  • Dan Bar-On and Julia Chaitin: Parenthood and the Holocaust , Wallstein Verlag 2008
  • Dan Bar-On, Léon Wurmser , Micha Hilgers and Maria Spychiger: Shame - Shame - Recognition. Remembering and learning. Texts on human rights education 3 , Lit Verlag 2007
  • Christiane Walesch-Schneller, Dan Bar-On, Friedel Scheer-Nahor and Elaine Wolff: Closer than is appears / closer than it seems. Dances for the Blue House , Modo Verlag 2007
  • Tell your life! My Paths to Dialogue Work and Political Understanding , Edition Körber Foundation 2004
  • The burden of silence. Conversations with children of Nazi perpetrators , 2003 (first published in German in 1993 in Campus-Verlag)
  • Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, Adnan Musallam and Eyal Naveh: Getting to know the historical narrative of the other - Palestinians and Israelis - A textbook initiative as a contribution to understanding in Israel and Palestine , PRIME Peace Research Institute in the Middle East, 2003 / Berghof Conflict Research, German translation 2009, as PDF on the Berghof Conflict Research Institute website
  • The "others" in us. Dialogue as a Model of Intercultural Conflict Management , 2nd edition, Edition Körber Foundation 2006
  • Bridging the Abyss , Edition Körber Foundation 2002
  • Tell your life story. Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians, Central European University Press 2006
  • Susanne Kutz, Dirk Wegner and Dan Bar-On: Bridging the Gap: Storytelling as a Way to Work through Political and Collective Hostilities , Körber Foundation 2000
  • Fear and hope. From survivors to grandchildren - three generations of the Holocaust , European Publishing House 1997
  • Dan Bar-On, Konrad Brendler and A. Paul Hare: Something broke at the roots ... Identity formation of German and Israeli youth in the shadow of the Holocaust , Campus Verlag 1997
  • The Indescribable and the Undiscussable. Reconstructing Human Discourse after Trauma , Central European University Press 1999

further reading

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Monmouth University receives Fulbright Scholarship to host Israeli and Palestinian scholars ( Memento June 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed November 29, 2008)
  2. ↑ Der Standard : "Dan Bar-On died at the age of 69" , September 5, 2008
  3. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Bar-On, Dan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli author, psychologist, and Holocaust and peace researcher
DATE OF BIRTH 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Haifa , Israel
DATE OF DEATH September 4, 2008
Place of death Tel Aviv , Israel