Obituary – Asher Ben-Shmuel
1934–2026
Asher Ben-Shmuel was already well past sixty when, in 2000, together with Shlomit and Micha Gross, he founded the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv. He had already lived a full and successful life: he had studied medicine, started a family and—again together with Micha Gross—opened the first private sleep laboratory in Zurich. But now something new was to emerge: a center in the heart of Tel Aviv where the ideas of the Bauhaus—founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius and closed in 1933 under pressure from the National Socialists—would live on, and where the memory of the pioneers of the New Building movement who had fled Europe would be preserved. In the last three decades of his life, Asher Ben-Shmuel devoted himself to this mission with great dedication. It is not least thanks to the work of the Bauhaus Center that Tel Aviv’s treasure of more than 4,000 Bauhaus buildings has been preserved, renovated, and ultimately recognized in 2003 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
For Asher Ben-Shmuel, this commitment was first and foremost about making Tel Aviv’s architectural significance known beyond the borders of Israel. Yet he undoubtedly also personally identified with the fate of those Bauhaus artists who had escaped persecution by the National Socialists and found a new homeland and a new field of activity in Eretz Israel. For he, too, was not a native Israeli. Born in 1934 in Temeswar—today Timișoara, Romania—the young Asher Fogel, as he was then called, set out for Palestine after the war without his parents. Like so many before and after him, the British turned him back, and he spent nine months in an internment camp in Cyprus. Only in 1948 was he finally able to enter the country that would become his home.
After attending the agricultural school “Mikve Israel” near Tel Aviv, serving as a sergeant during the 1956 Suez War, and exploring fields such as agronomy, political science, and musicology, he ultimately turned to the study of medicine. A scholarship from the University of Kiel brought him back to Europe. There he met the young Zurich native Judith Kimche, his later wife and the mother of his three children. This encounter led him to Switzerland, where he completed his training as a neurologist and established his own medical practice in Zurich.
Asher Ben-Shmuel was a physician with heart and soul—an outstanding neurologist who cared for his patients with empathy and deep professional expertise. What further distinguished him was his subtle humor and sense of irony, which gave him perspective and lent even the gravest matters a touch of lightness. He encountered human suffering not only in his professional life but also in his own. Although he rarely spoke about it, the years of war, the journey from war-torn Europe to distant Palestine, the later failure of his marriage, and the far too early deaths of his two daughters must have shaped him profoundly. How he managed to preserve his characteristic cheerfulness despite these blows of fate will remain his secret forever.
What surely sustained him was his unwavering love for people: for the patients entrusted to his care, above all for his son Joav, his three grandsons Adam, Jaron, and Dan, and especially for Ruth Luks, the companion of his later years. Through Ruthi he found once more a new, extended family; his grandchildren gave him hope for the future.
Even as illness accompanied his final years, Asher Ben-Shmuel never lost his keen interest in the world around him, in his fellow human beings, and in politics—particularly that of his homeland Israel, which filled him with growing concern. Nevertheless, he remained deeply and steadfastly connected to the country. It had been a long journey from his religiously shaped Eastern European parental home to the secular, enlightened world of Western culture and science that determined both his professional and personal path. That he never lost his inner compass was undoubtedly due to his grounding in Judaism, which he lived—even if no longer in a strictly religious sense. He collected Judaica and works by Israeli artists and supported charitable organizations such as Magen David Adom. He also loved introducing his non-Jewish friends in Switzerland to the beauty of Jewish traditions—on shared journeys or during his legendary Seder evenings. When he presented a particularly rare piece from his Judaica collection, explained scenes from Chagall’s Bible illustrations, or announced a new exhibition at the Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv, his eyes would light up, and one could sense where his heart was at home.
Klara Obermüller
