Michael Heltzer (1928–2010)

Michael Heltzer was born to a Jewish family in Tallinn, Estonia, then part of the USSR. His parents were Ida (Levin) and Leib Aryeh Heltzer. In 1940, during World War II, he was deported with his parents to Tatarstan, where he went to high school from 1941 to 1945. From 1945, he studied the history of the ancient Near and Middle East at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Leningrad University (now St. Petersburg University), but was not permitted to work at the university after graduation. In the first half of the 1950s, he was a teacher at Tihemets Forestry Technical School and Pärnu Lydia Koidula Secondary School. Later, he was head teacher at Tallinn Distance Education High School. In 1958, he joined the faculty of the Pedagogical Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania, and rose to become full professor and chair of ancient history. He earned a master's degree from the Hermitage in Leningrad, and in 1969 completed his PhD at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. In 1971, he moved with his family to Israel, where he became associate professor of ancient Near Eastern history at the University of Haifa for many years. He was named professor emeritus on his retirement in 1996. He was a visiting professor at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, the University of Binghampton, New York, and the University of Tartu, Estonia. Heltzer wrote more than 300 scholarly papers and several books, specializing in the history of ancient Israel, Bible exegesis, and ancient Hebrew inscriptions.