Moshé Feldenkrais 1904 - 1984
The Feldenkrais® Method of somatic education was developed by the Israeli engineer, scientist, Jiu-Jitsu and Judo master Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais.
Born 1904 in a Ukrainian village intermittently ravaged by pogroms, he left his family at the age of fourteen and made his way to Palestine. He helped build the first Jewish settlements there. In order to help defend his community he learned Jiu-Jitsu and taught self-defense.
After graduating from high school in Tel Aviv in 1927, Moshé Feldenkrais went to France. In Paris he received degrees in electrical engineering and mechanics and earned a doctorate in physics. From 1933 to 1940 he worked as a nuclear engineer for Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute.
During his stay in Paris Moshé Feldenkrais was to play a decisive part in the development of French Jiu-Jitsu and Judo. In 1933 he began to give lessons and instinctively applied the principles of physics he worked with and his rich cultural background to his teaching of self-defense. He cofounded the Jiu-Jitsu Club de France, studied with Jigoro Kano, the founder of Judo, and was the first European to be awarded a black belt in 1936.
In 1940, having escaped to Britain on the eve of World War II, Feldenkrais worked with the British Admiralty as a scientific officer and continued to teach Judo. A chronic knee injury prompted him to apply his knowledge of physics, body mechanics, neurology, learning theory and psychology to a new understanding of human function and maturation. In 1943 he lectured to the British Association of Scientific Workers, later summarised in his book Body and Mature Behavior.
In 1949 Moshé Feldenkrais returned to Palestine to help build the newly founded state of Israel. From 1952 onwards he devoted himself entirely to working out his own method and founded the Feldenkrais Institute in Tel Aviv, where he trained the first generation of Feldenkrais practitioners in the late 1960s.
Moshé Feldenkrais wrote five books about the method as well as four books on Judo. He taught in Tel Aviv, Europe and the USA. Among his most famous students were Ben Gurion, Yehudi Menuhin and Peter Brooke. He trained the second and third generation of Feldenkrais practitioners in San Francisco from 1975 to 1978 and in Amherst from 1980 to 1983.
Moshé Feldenkrais died in Tel Aviv in 1984.