A little bit about myself


My name is Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin). Born and raised in the Netherlands, I have lived in Israel since 1992. I am a historian and a columnist for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad, and I have been teaching English at the high school of the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, Israel for the last 15 years. In my classes, besides the English high school curriculum, I usually have time to do extracurricular projects. I have developed class projects (often using material provided by Centropa) on topics like human rights, refugees, Holocaust, migration, and resistance in Nazi-Germany. You can get an impression of those and other projects by clicking here. I've participated in Centropa seminars in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, and Prague. With two different Ukrainian schools, in 2024 and 2025 I did a project titled 'Comfort Food in Times of War', in which our students shared experiences from the wars in their country and made videos about dishes that helped them cope with everything.

Since 2014, I've cooperated (and become good friends) with colleagues and schools in Stuttgart, Leonberg, Ostfildern, Darmstadt, and Mannheim, and I also have gotten the chance to teach in dozens of classes in those towns and cities. I've participated in several 'shared existence' programs. In 2019, together with five students of Leo Baeck and a colleague plus five students of the Sisters of Nazareth (Christian Arab) school in Haifa, I took part in the Friends Forever International program in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. I am also an alumnus of the From the Sources program for Arab and Jewish educators of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

Right before I came to Berlin on 11.7.25, I was in the Netherlands for two weeks, to visit family, and to interview more or less well known Dutch men and women, Jewish and non-Jewish, about their relationship with Israel. A book with the interviews will be published this fall, in cooperation with CIDI, the Center for Information and Documentation Israel in The Hague. 

I'm married to Yael, a math, computer and homeroom teacher in an elementary school in Haifa. We have three adult children. 

If you want to contact me, you can email me at yonathandrorbaron(at)gmail.com.




Three pictures. One is real, the others were made with AI.

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