Avner Falk

In 2005, his book Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2004) won the Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association's Choice magazine.

It turned out that the disc was a relic from a Torah scroll that Falk's Polish-Jewish maternal grandfather, Jozef Cwi Szpiro (1880–1941), had donated to his Zgierz synagogue in 1927 in memory of his deceased parents, and that some time after 1939 came into the possession of Otto Michel (1903–1993), a well-known Tübingen university theologian, a former Nazi and SA member, who after the Second World War and the Holocaust became a Jewish Studies pioneer in Tübingen, and whose widow had given it to the city museum.

Since then, Falk has been writing a psychohistorical book, which has also become a detective story, about when and how this relic of his grandfather's Torah scroll came into Michel's possession.

In November 2011 Falk received this relic of his grandfather's Torah scroll from the mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer (born 1971), in a public ceremony in Tübingen's city hall, at which Falk delivered a German-language lecture on his findings entitled "Die Verneinung der Vergangenheit: Die Geschichte einer Thorarolle" ("The Denial of the Past: The Story of a Torah Scroll").

1987 Resident Scholar, Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center, Bellagio, Italy 1997 Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society 1999 Featured Scholar, Clio's Psyche 2006 Outstanding Academic Title award for Fratricide in the Holy Land from the American Library Association's Choice magazine Books 1985 משה דיין: האיש והאגדה.

Cranbury, New Jersey & London: Associated University Presses 2004 Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.