Moshe Woolf (1878-1971)

Dr Moshe Woolf faded into death at the age of 94, after a long and rich life. With his death we lose one of the last pioneers of the psychoanalytical movement. He belonged to that generation of courageous, strong-willed and individualistic personalities who helped to build and stabilize Freud's teachings, and who contributed to their enlargement. Woolf had to struggle all his life under ever-changing circumstances. He did so in a determined but at the same time in a quiet, unaggressive manner, using humour and jovial bursts of laughter as his most disarming weapons. He also contributed through his patient teaching of physicians, educators, kindergarten teachers and arts. In spite of his great knowledge and wide influence, which found expression in two different academic appointments (one at the University of Moscow and one at the Tel-Aviv University), he remained modest and retiring, declined public honours, the one exception being the Presidency of the Psychoanalytic Society in Israel for ten years, and its Honorary President until the end of his life.

His pupils, of which I was one, were allowed to know much of his life circumstances and his many non-professional interests, but little of his personal life. He liked to keep up the façade of the analyst, sharing his intimate concerns with only a few, chiefly his charming wife and companion, Assia, a painter, who nursed him devotedly in the last years of his life when he suffered from severe Parkinson's disease.

Dr Woolf typified the outcome of the world's political unrest, Born in Russia, he went to Germany for his medical and psychoanalytic training. In 1911 he returned to his beloved Russia in order to work and teach there. With the outbreak of the Revolution he became its enthusiastic supporter and had the great fortune to come into contact with leading figures in the field of education and medicine. He could thereby exert his influence in modifying child-rearing programmes through his psychoanalytic know