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WINNIPEG \/ JERUSALEM \u2014 I was born in Winnipeg, where winter winds taught you early not just how to bundle up, but how to face the world with a certain quiet resilience. The Jewish community there was small enough that everyone seemed to know everyone, yet large enough that stories and personalities filled every corner.<\/p>\n
My earliest memories are of watching my father, Joe, sit at a chessboard with the kind of laser-focused intensity most people reserve for surgery. He was a champion\u2014formally and by reputation\u2014and though I absorbed a lifetime of lessons from the cadence of his thoughtful silence, I never followed him into competitive chess. What I inherited wasn\u2019t his trophies, but his discipline, his way of analyzing the world, and his belief in the power of thinking things through.<\/p>\n
By 1964, that thinking led me to a decision that would redefine my life: immigrating to Israel. I was young, idealistic, searching for meaning, and Israel at that time pulsed with a raw energy\u2014uncertain, hopeful, and alive. The first time I stepped onto its soil, I felt something shift. The land was rugged, the culture intense, the challenges enormous\u2014but something in me felt completely at home.<\/p>\n
At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I would eventually complete my Ph.D., I found myself drawn to questions that felt deeply connected to the world around me: How do people cope with upheaval? What makes families resilient? Why do some crumble under stress while others somehow grow stronger? Israel, with all its layers of history and conflict, was a living laboratory for understanding trauma, adaptation, and the human ability to endure.<\/p>\n
Eventually my academic home became Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The desert has a way of stripping life down to its essentials, and in that landscape I found clarity and purpose. As Director of the Center for Family Life Research and Counselling, I was surrounded by students eager to understand the complexities of human behavior, and by communities facing real, daily challenges. Every project, every study, every counseling initiative felt connected to actual lives\u2014not abstract theories.<\/p>\n
I was fortunate to be named a Fulbright Scholar along the way, which allowed me to explore and exchange ideas internationally. But the work always returned to the same roots: how individuals and families navigate adversity, and how we as professionals can help.<\/p>\n
Outside academia, though, there was another constant in my life\u2014sport. In my youth I threw myself into hockey, football, and tennis with the abandon only a young man possesses. But golf became something different: a companion, a meditation, a passion. There is something almost therapeutic about standing on a fairway with the horizon stretching endlessly ahead.<\/p>\n
My golfing journey delivered moments I still shake my head about. Three holes-in-one\u2014two of them only a week apart\u2014and then, as if the game wanted to make a point, an albatross on a 412-yard par-4 shortly after. A sports journalist later wrote about it, but even now the sequence feels almost mythic, as if it happened to someone I used to know. Earlier, I had been the Glendale Junior Gross and Handicap Champion, but I could never have predicted the extraordinary run that would come years later.<\/p>\n
Of course, none of my pursuits\u2014academic or athletic\u2014would have been possible without my wife, Orly. A journalist with a sharp mind and a warm soul, she has been at my side through every chapter. Together we raised four children, each carving out their own path, each adding a unique note to the symphony of our family life. And then came thirteen grandchildren\u2014an entire world of laughter, noise, questions, and joy. When they fill the room, the air changes; it becomes fuller, softer, more alive.<\/p>\n
When I look back now, what stands out are not just achievements but transitions: from the frozen streets of Winnipeg to the sun-bleached Negev; from watching my father\u2019s intense concentration over a chessboard to observing families rebuild their emotional worlds; from chasing pucks across frozen rinks to watching a golf ball disappear into a distant cup; from a young immigrant searching for a place to belong to a grandfather surrounded by generations that followed him.<\/p>\n
If there is a thread running through all these moments, it is the belief that people are capable of tremendous resilience. I have witnessed it in families shattered by trauma who found their way forward. I have witnessed it in my own journey\u2014from one continent to another, from uncertainty to purpose.<\/p>\n
And as I reflect on a life shaped by curiosity, commitment, and community, I carry with me a deep sense of gratitude\u2014for the people who guided me, the students who challenged me, the family who supported me, and the country that gave me a home.<\/p>\n
With hope and guarded optimism<\/p>\n
Fondly and hopefully,<\/p>\n
Solly<\/p>\n
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