Judith Elkan obituary

My friend Judith Elkan, who has died aged 92, was an influential child and adult psychotherapist who helped shape attitudes to infant care. She also worked for peace in the Middle East, setting up and running the UK Friends of the Bereaved Families Forum (FBFF), to support the 650-strong network of Israeli and Palestinian families working together for reconciliation.

Judith was born in Jerusalem, the youngest of eight children. Her parents, Jamile (nee Catan) and Eliyahu Shamah, a businessman, were born in Aleppo, part of a thriving Jewish-Syrian community that had existed there for hundreds of years, but emigrated first to Jamaica, then New York, then to Brazil and ultimately in the 1920s to Palestine.

In 1938, when Judith was nine, she moved with her family to Britain so that her brother could have an operation. The second world war broke out and the family were unable to travel home.

Judith stayed on after the war, to complete her secondary school education, and returned to what was now the new state of Israel in 1948 to study psychology at Jerusalem University. Whilst back in Britain to do postgraduate studies at the Tavistock Clinic in London, she met Geoffrey Elkan, and they married in 1961 and settled in London.

In the 1980s she made regular trips to Israel to teach the benefits of infant observation. She also made contact with Palestinian psychotherapists and began to cross to the West Bank to teach there. Speaking fluent Arabic and Hebrew, she applied her therapeutic skills to help towards healing the divide.

While in Israel, she heard about the work of the Bereaved Families Forum, started in 1995 by an Israeli, Yitzhak Frankenthal, after his son was killed. In 2004, after a talk in London by a forum member, Judith set up the UK chapter of the organisation, which she chaired until her death. She arranged speaking tours in the UK for Israeli and Palestinian members and organised fundraising events.

Judith used her charm and chutzpah to promote the work of the FBFF. While walking outside Kenwood House in Hampstead she spotted the actor Juliet Stevenson, and introduced herself. After half an hour of animated conversation, Stevenson had agreed to become a patron. Rowan Williams, then archbishop of Canterbury, was recruited as a supporter after she met him in a lunch queue at a seminar.

Judith’s therapeutic work and her activism were indivisible – both were about helping people to discover how to build bridges across the fractures that exist within ourselves and in the world around us. She was optimistic about the possibility of change but also knew that change will only happen through action. A favourite saying of hers was from Rabbi Tarfon, dating back nearly 2,000 years: “You are not obliged to complete the job, but neither are you free to do nothing.”

She dealt with grief in her own life. Geoffrey died in 2002, and her daughter Naomi, a doctor with the charity Medical Justice, died in 2018. She is survived by her children Daniel and Miriam and two grandchildren.