Leon Duval

Leon Duval was born in Johannesburg but moved to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1975. The Victorian culture confronted in the days before Australia became ethnically diverse prompted them to shorten their surname to Duval. An accountant by profession, Leon discovered that many of the clients he looked after were Holocaust survivors which prompted him to search for a greater understanding of his Jewish inheritance and the underlying causes driving antisemitism. After retiring from professional life and moving to Jerusalem, Leon undertook an extensive course to train as a guide for the Yad Vashem history museum and is now a committed amateur historian spending many hours researching the history of the Jews in Europe and that of his own family’s Lithuanian roots. His occasional blog appears on the Times of Israel platform and he recently published a book telling the story of a Kindertransport survivor.