In Memoriam 
Our Founder

Reuven Bar-Levav, M.D., remembered watching a military parade with a child's excitement and joy soon after the Nazis assumed power in Germany. Alerted by his innocent enthusiasm and increasing signs of anti-Semitism, his parents realized Berlin was no longer safe for them and spirited the family away to Palestine, leaving their business, friends, culture and most of their possessions behind.

Jewish Palestine was one of two pivotal points in a career spanning continents and crossing lines of academic disciplines, after beginning with all the adventure an adolescent could desire. The 1930s and '40s were turbulent decades in Palestine, as the Second World War was waged and the struggle for an independent state of Israel began. Reuven, who had dropped out of high school, drifted into journalism, a profession he admired since he saw the work of the Hebrew writer, Achad-Ha'am. Eventually, Reuven became night editor of the daily newspaper, Davar, where his love of clear thinking and his fondness for writing and the smell of ink offered what many young men only dream of: the opportunity to bring his talents, desires and duties together.

So accomplished was he as a young writer that he soon became a pamphleteer for Haganah, the underground Jewish self-defense organization, precursor of Israel's armed forces. He worked with David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, explaining the need for armed struggle against the British without engaging in personal terror. His actions pitted him against the more extreme Irgun led by Menachem Begin, and had both the British police and the Irgun searching for him.

After a brief stint as art critic for Ma'Ariv, then the largest afternoon newspaper in Israel, Reuven passed the London, England, Matriculation Exam and was accepted at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, where he began his studies in the United States. He eventually came to teach in Detroit, obtaining his undergraduate degree in economics at Wayne University.

If Palestine was one pivotal point in Reuven's life, Detroit was another. It was in Michigan that the varied facets of his personality were nurtured and polished while he wended his way through a graduate degree in public administration at what is now Wayne State. But politics was not a suitable career for him outside Israel, so he studied law for a while at Wayne, switching to premedical courses, and enrolling at the School of Medicine, earning his M.D. in 1962. (Throughout all this activity, he supported himself by teaching Hebrew at Detroit United Hebrew Schools and at Congregation Shaarey Zedek.) By 1966 he had completed his internship at Harper Hospital and his residency in psychiatry at Sinai, and established a flourishing private practice in the Fisher Building in Detroit.

In pre-Israel Palestine, Reuven fought to free people politically. During his career, he fought to free individuals from the tyranny of irrational emotions. In Palestine, he was an art critic. In Detroit, he became a patron of the arts, especially at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the symphony. In Palestine, he wrote political pamphlets. In Detroit, he wrote books and hundreds of articles, including many influential editorials in the Detroit Medical News. In Palestine, he addressed only the intellect. In Detroit, he added the body and spirit to his areas of concern. In Palestine, he focused his talents on one segment of people. In Detroit, he embraced the problems of humanity.

Reuven had a robust practice in intensive psychotherapy, working with patients' fears of abandonment, engulfment, and non-being. He was an innovator at the cutting edge of psychiatry and psychotherapy. In his spare time, he enjoyed music, travel, nature, reading and teaching people how to be fair, firm and loving parents. The latter was especially important to him as he saw our society as increasingly permissive failing to demand self-restraint, and making fact and fantasy are often indistinguishable from each other. He believed, as a result, that many have been left looking in vain for a reliable moral compass. Reuven supported many charities, viewing his contributions as an obligation of living in society. He and his family created the Bar-Levav Family Foundation to continue these philanthropic interests indefinitely.