Steve Ornstein: Remembering Dr. Eli Lasch Prominent Israeli Physician, Pediatrician & Dear Friend
During this time of global chaos, Israel being the center of attention and an excuse for global antisemitism, my dear friend Dr. Eli Lasch entered my thoughts. He was a giant in his time. A Doctor, healer, and wise man. The following is a piece I wrote about him and his passing. Included at the end is a bio by AI about many of his attributes. He is one of those rare folks who deserve to be remembered by all.
This is from the book, LET THERE BE FREEDOM-the Bible unveiled by Dr. Eli Lasch. Z”l. He was born in Germany in 1929. Fled with his family to Palestine in 1936. Following his medical training in Switzerland, Israel and the U.S.A., where he specialized in paediatrics and public health, he spent three years in West Africa developing systems of child care where none had previously existed.
After his return home he founded and directed a paediatric hospital for the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, while functioning simultaneously as Director General of the local health services.
Dr. Lasch has taught in many medical schools, and has published over sixty papers in medical journals. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine. He was once nominated for the prestigious Lasker Award (called the American Nobel Prize).
In 1984 Dr. Lasch realized that he had fulfilled most of his goals and started looking for new challenges. After a series of spiritual revelations, he left behind a thriving medical and academic career and went to stay with the Findhorn Community in Scotland. Here during long periods of meditation and reflection, he was given insights into the hidden meaning of the Bible. This book represents the result of those “channellings”.
This was published in 1989 in Great Britain at the logos press.
We were very close friends. He once took me to Jerusalem to meet some of the Palestinian Doctors from Gaza that worked directly with him. It was a meeting that still remains embedded in my memory with the respect and love that they shared for him. We, Eli, Dr. Moshe Dror, Yoram Getzler, Elisheva, and myself shared endless hours discussing politics at the time, Torah and what the future has in store for all of us. For a while he decided to move to Switzerland where I visited him in Lausanne. It was there that he was in almost every newspaper and media because of his “spiritual” healing he presented on European Television. Hundreds of people would call in to the stations sharing how they were healed by him. I have a copy of one of the newspapers While visiting us in Safed around 1982 he saw my middle son Ori and said we need to take him to the hospital right away after looking at his eyes that he has pneumonia. No signs at all that we noticed. But we did of course and he in fact had it. When we returned to the U.S. in 1988 Eli visited us in Woodstock for a time. When we returned to Israel he would spend lots of time with us. He was family. On israelseen in the archives under Eli Lasch are some of his blog posts and podcasts he was part of with moshe dror and others.
Here is an excerpt from the book that reminded me of some of our conversations we have had over the years.
“ According to Erich Fromm the history of mankind up to this day is primarily the history of idolatry, from the worship of primitive idols made out of wood and mud to that of modern ones like states, leaders, and consumer products, all blessed by a God turned into an idol. And he continues by saying that worshipping an idol is really worshipping oneself. This self, however, is but a limited and partial aspect of man – his intelligence, his physical prowess, his power, his fame, etc. Once man identifies himself with but a partial aspect of himself, he limits himself to that aspect, loses the totality of his humanity and stops growing. Eric Fromm goes on and finally states that for him an idol is a thing without life, whereas God is life itself.
If we summarize all these definitions, we realize that an idol is anything and everything which man fabricates to limit himself, whether it is material, ideological or even spiritual.
The hallmark of an idol is thus bondage, and its weapon is fear. According to these definitions the strongest bastions of idolatry nowadays are the established religions, which have changed monotheism into monoidolatry and God into a super idol whom man is supposed to love through fear, as any weakening of love becomes a ‘venial sin’ punished by condemnation to hell. These definitions, too, are incomplete (as definitions tend to be), since idolatry is also seeing the universe the way we want to see it, and sifting reality through screens composed of preconceived ideas. Seeing images(idols) instead of reality. And this is what is meant by the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” Images are our own creations which distort reality. According to some psychologists 70% of what we perceive is our own images and only 30% is reality. We see what we want to see, and sift out everything which does not fit in with our view of the universe.
We see a universe cluttered with our concepts and assumptions, cluttered with idols. It is to these idols that we are subservient until this day, to these idols that we bow down. It is these idols from which we are afraid to free ourselves. Instead of seeing the universe, we see our image of it. Instead of seeing our fellow man, we see our image of him. And instead of seeing God? This is one more lesson which the bible wants to teach us. If we make an image of God, we change Him into an it, into a thing, which has a fixed form. This form is, however, but the artificer’s image of God, and in the previous chapter we have already shown that we cannot comprehend God and give Him a form.
God is not a thing but the principle of life. God. Like life, has no fixed form but manifests itself in any form needed. This absence of any form whatsoever gives each generation the freedom to visualize God according to its need. This way the concept of God is kept alive and relevant and petrifaction is avoided.
As a wise man once said: the giving of form causes spiritual poverty and bondage. This is what the Bible tries to prevent.
The God of the Bible is a God without form or even name. “And YHWH spoke unto you out of the midst of the fire. Ye heard that which had been said but saw no image. You only heard a voice.” The fifth commandment insists that even a name is superfluous: “Thou shalt not take the name YHWH thy God in vain.” Names too can be changed into things. Names, furthermore, have an incredible amount of power and most iniquities are done ‘in the name of’. In the name of God, in the name of Christ, in the name of Allah-these were the banners under which the holy wars were fought. And how many inhumanities are perpetrated nowadays in the name of the state, of communism, of democracy, and even in the name of the law. What are all these deeds if not ‘taking the name of the lord in vain’?
“If you insist on doing what you want to do, do it at least under your own name. Don’t hide behind the name of God. For God will not exonerate the one who takes his name in vain”.
Dr. Eli Lasch (full name Eli Erich Lasch or Eli E. Lasch) was a prominent Israeli physician, pediatrician, and later a figure interested in alternative healing, mysticism, and reincarnation research.
He was born on April 16, 1929, in Hamburg, Germany, into a Jewish family. In 1936, at the age of about 7, he fled with his parents to Palestine (pre-state Israel) to escape Nazi persecution. He studied medicine in Lausanne (Switzerland) and Israel, earning his Doctor of Medicine from the Hebrew University in 1956. He later obtained a Master in Public Health from Yale University in 1981.
Dr. Lasch had a diverse and international medical career:
- He interned and worked in pediatrics in Israeli hospitals (e.g., Poriah Hospital in Tiberias and Zahalon University Hospital in Jaffa).
- In the 1960s, he served as director of pediatric services in Haute Volta (now Burkina Faso), West Africa, where he was the first Israeli doctor there and received the country’s highest honor, the Chevalier de l’Ordre National.
- Back in Israel, he was deputy director of pediatrics at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.
- Notably, he worked for about 12 years as a senior consultant coordinating health services in the Gaza Strip (starting in the 1960s under Israeli administration), where he helped establish widespread pediatric care and became known as a bridge-builder for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Originally an atheist and scientist, Dr. Lasch underwent a profound mystical/visionary experience that transformed him into a spiritual healer, past-life regression therapist, and deep student of the Bible/Torah (which he approached scientifically, seeking underlying patterns and messages). He explored topics like near-death experiences, reincarnation, and spiritual dimensions of healing.
He is perhaps most widely known in popular literature for witnessing and documenting a striking reincarnation case in the Druze community in the Golan Heights (near the Syrian border).
A 3-year-old Druze boy with a red birthmark on his head claimed memories of a past life where he was murdered with an axe. Dr. Lasch accompanied the boy, family, and village elders to a neighbouring village, where the child identified his “past-life” killer by name, led them to where the body was buried (finding a skeleton with a matching head wound), and the alleged murder weapon (an axe). The accused reportedly confessed after this.
The case was later popularized in German therapist Trutz Hardo’s book Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today (published around 2005). Dr. Lasch presented on related topics, including past-life regression cases tied to WWII, at conferences like the World Congress of Regression Therapy in 2003. He was a member of various organizations, including the Israeli Medical Association, Israeli Pediatrics Association, New York Academy of Sciences, International Association for Near-Death Studies, and others. He also contributed writings on biblical interpretation and health topics. Dr. Eli Lasch passed away in 2009 at the age of 80 in Berlin, Germany, after a full life as a physician, healer, and mystic. He authored or contributed to works like Das Wunder von Gaza (about his experiences there) and articles on science and scripture.
He remains remembered for his humanitarian medical work in Gaza, his openness to unconventional topics like reincarnation (unusual for a mainstream doctor), and his personal spiritual journey.
