Jacob Meyer Levy was an Israeli educator, historian, translator and writer.
Biography
Born in the Ukrainian village of Nesolon to a religious Jewish family. At the early age of 12 he was studying at the Novograd-VolynskyYeshiva but at the age of 19 he became an ardent Zionist and immigrated to Ottoman Palestine. In 1914, he enrolled in the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, where he studied for two years. In 1916, presented with the choice of becoming an Ottoman citizen or being deported back to Ukraine, he chose the former and was promptly drafted into the Ottoman army and sent, along with his classmates, to officers' school in Istanbul. Following World War I he led a school for abandoned children, war orphans in Turkey. In 1925, after completing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, he was invited by the Jewish Consistory of Bulgaria to be the superintendent of the Jewish schools in Bulgaria. At the end of his term he returned to Paris to continue his studies and in 1935 received his PhD in educational psychology from the Sorbonne. In addition to education-related essays published in professional journals such as "Hed Hachinuch", he published short stories in the most important Hebrew periodicals of the period: Y.H. Brenner's "HaAdamah", Joseph Klausner's "HaShiloach" and Jacob Fichman's "Ma-abarot". Between 1938 and 1956 he was the editor of "Hachinuch" – the Pedagogy and Psychologyquarterly of the Israeli Teachers Association and during that time he published many books, including "Israel Ba-Amim" – a series of history textbooks used extensively in Israeli schools, especially in the kibbutz movement. He was an editor of the Encyclopedia Chinuchit" and published a series of teacher training books – "Guides" to elementary school grades. His children: From his first wife Shoshana Taborovsky-Tavor) a son: Amnon and from his second wife Shoshana Itygin a son: Avinoam.
His work
Dr. Jacob Levy published numerous books. The most important ones among them: a series of history textbooks and the translation of four of French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson's books into Hebrew. In writing his history textbooks, Dr. Levy's viewpoint was that studying historical dates is less important that learning the processes that led to historical events. Indeed, in his series "Israel among the nations" one could hardly find dates and history is told in a narrative, compelling way.
