Dan Bar-On
October 3, 1938 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2008
I met Dan Bar-On on attending his workshop at the Third International Conference on the Holocaust and Education, held at Yad Vashem's International Schoool for Holocaust Education, Jerusalem, April 8-11, 2002.
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The conference was titled 'The Legacy of Holocaust Survivors.'
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Dan was born October 3, 1938 in Haifa. He left this world on September 4, 2008 in Tel Aviv. He was a husband, father and grandfather. His widow was Tammy Bar-On, see In Memoriam I penned about her.
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His 2002 conference workshop was titled:
From the Holocaust to Current Ethnic Conflicts - The TRT Group Experience.
(TRT: To Reflect and Trust).
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I was really impressed and moved by his workshop. He was a real innovator, having brought together people of enormously disparate backgrounds together in healing and reflection workshops, e.g. adult children of Jewish Holocaust survivors and adult children of Nazi war criminals; peoples from opposing sides of the Northern Ireland conflict; South Africans per apartheid, etc.
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His books included, among others, these titles:
Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 1995. ISBN 978-0674295223; Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press 1989. ISBN 0-674-52185-4; Tell Your Life Story: Creating Dialogue among Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians. Budapest: Central European University Press 2006. ISBN 978-963-7326-70-7
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This is an excerpt from the one-page description of his workshop in the hardcopy 74- page booklet which conference attendees including workshop facilitators received:
"The present study describes a new phase of the TRT group that brought together, in the framework of a workshop, professionals from South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinian Authority who work with victims and victimizers in current conflicts."
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Professor Dan Bar-On taught in the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
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At the conference I gave him a linocut print as a gift as I was so moved by his workshop. He gave me a copy of the book "Bridging the Gap: Story Telling as a Way to Work through Political and Collective Hostilities." Published by Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung, 2000. ISBN 3-89684-030-4. He was the editor, which includes a chapter he penned.
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May his memory be blessed, written by AKS, February 17, 2023