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.
