TEL AVIV, Israel — Yehuda Bauer, one of Israel's foremost Holocaust scholars who shaped the way people around the world study and learn about the Holocaust, has died in Jerusalem. He was 98.
No specific cause of death was given by the Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, which announced his death Friday evening.
Bauer published dozens of books and founded numerous international Holocaust education initiatives over a career that spanned more than six decades. He spoke Czech, Slovak, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and Polish, and learned Welsh while studying at Cardiff University in Wales. His mastery of languages allowed him to study source material in its original form and connect directly with audiences across the world.
''One of his important points was that the Holocaust is not only a particular event that affected particular people, but that the Holocaust was also universal,'' said Dr. David Silberklang, a senior historian at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem who worked closely with Bauer for years.
''Once it happened, and human beings did what they did, it has entered the playbook, the potential of what human beings could do and therefore could be done again,'' he said.
Bauer was born in Prague in 1926. As a teenager, his family was able to flee Europe in 1939 and came to British Mandate Palestine via Romania. After returning from university in Wales, he joined Kibbutz Shoval in southern Israel and studied at the Hebrew University. He lived in Jerusalem for the last decades of his life.
Bauer launched his academic career in the 1960s, during a time when people in Israel were just starting to talk more openly about the Holocaust. In the immediate years after the Holocaust, as many survivors were shattered and trying to build their lives, very few people spoke openly about what had happened.
Silberklang said that the country needed time and perspective before it could start examining the Holocaust under an academic lens, and that Bauer was one of the first wave of scholars to begin rigorous research on a topic that had previously been too painful to discuss.