- published: 14 Jan 2015
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Yehuda Bauer (Hebrew: יהודה באואר; born 1926) is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Bauer was fluent at an early age in the Czech, Slovak and German languages, later learning Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and Polish. His father had strong Zionist convictions and during the 1930s tried to raise money to get his family to the British Mandate of Palestine. On March 15, 1939, the family migrated to Palestine.
Bauer attended high school in in Haifa and at sixteen, inspired by his history teacher, Rachel Krulik, decided to dedicate himself to studying history. Upon completing high school, he joined the Palmach. He attended Cardiff University, Wales, on a British scholarship, interrupting his studies to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, after which he completed his degree.
Bauer returned to Israel to join Kibbutz Shoval and began his graduate work in history at Hebrew University. He received his doctorate in 1960 for a thesis on the British Mandate of Palestine. The following year, he began teaching at the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.