Jehuda L. Wallach

Jehuda Lothar Wallach (21 May 1921 in Haigerloch, Germany – 1 August 2008 in Tel-Aviv, Israel) was an Israeli military officer and military historian.

Early life and education

The son of Louis Wallach and his wife Minna Rothheimer, Jehuda Walllach attended school in Mannheim, Germany, before he emigrated at age fifteen with his parents in 1936 to the British Mandate for Palestine. After graduating from high school, he lived for some years in Beit Zera on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, a kibbutz that had been founded nearly a decade earlier by immigrants from Austria and Germany. While in Beir Zera in 1940, he married Chava Turetzky, with whom he later had three children: Roni, Eliezer, and Uri.[1]

Military career

As a boy, Wallach joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization. During the Israel war of Independence, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Wallach was a battalion commander in the Givati Brigade and fought in the northern Negev . In 1949, he was appointed to command the Tenth Brigade and became one of the first army division commanders of the Israeli Defense Force. He later became a mechanized brigade commander and was head of the Israeli Army’s infantry training department. He left military service in 1960 to start his academic career, but during the Six Days War in 1967, he returned briefly to active service on the general staff. .[2]

Academic career

He attended the Hebrew University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962. Going on to the University of Oxford in England, he earned his doctor of philosophy in 1965 with a thesis on “Clausewitz and Schlieffen : a study of the impact of their theories on the German conduct of the 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 wars, “ under the supervision of Professor N.H. Gibbs, Chichele Professor of the History of War. On returning to Israel from Oxford in 1965, Wallach was appointed senior lecturer in military history at Tel Aviv University, where he was appointed associate professor in 1972 and professor in 1976. He was head of military history, a research fellow at the Institute of German History, and head of the School of History. In 1978, he became chairman of the Israeli Society for Military History and was a member of the Vienna International Investigation Commission that investigated the military career of Kurt Waldheim. He was a visiting professor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University.[3]

Prizes and honors

He was a recipient of the ALA Medal and, in 2003, Wallach was awarded the Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Literature.

Published works

References

  1. ↑ ’’Who’s Who in World Jewry (1988)
  2. ↑ ”Zum sechzigsten Geburtstag von Jehuda Wallach,” Jahrbuch des Instituts fur Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 10 (1981), pp. 15-16.
  3. ↑ ”Obituary”, Haaretz, 10.08.2008
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