You think, therefore I am – Lior Suchard
When I contacted Naomi Mauer, the publisher of this esteemed periodical to do an article on Lior Suchard, the celebrity mentalist, she was excited about the idea. Three years ago, she had seen him perform at a dinner for The Shalva Center. Naomi was there with her granddaughter, Elisheva.
“He picked her right away,” she said. “She had never heard of him and he surely didn’t know her. He asked her to think of someone who was not in the room. He gave her 3 minutes and she said okay, she was. He looked at her for a few minutes and then asked if it was a female. It was. Then he said that there were only three letters in the person’s name. I was sure she was thinking of her little sister whose name is Noa. He guessed Adi, one of Elisheva’s closest friends, and that was the correct answer. There was no way he could have known that. Elisheva was stunned and so was I.”
Stunning audiences is Suchard’s (pronounced Sue-shard) claim to fame. He has stunned audiences all over the world with his spellbinding show. In fact, Barbra Streisand was so impressed with him that she called him personally and asked him to open her show. Suchard will also be performing at this year’s Eurovision grand finale extravaganza being hosted by Israel.
I went to see him perform at Tel Aviv’s Beit HaChayal Theater. Israeli audiences pose a challenge to Suchard because they’re more skeptical and less easily fooled he says, but if the participants at the show are any indication, he won them over.
Suchard will be the first to admit that he isn’t only a mind-reader. In fact he uses psychological techniques like power of suggestion and intuitiveness, among his other prodigious skills, like a phenomenal memory. Though Suchard can’t pick the winners of the lottery, he is banned from playing blackjack in Las Vegas casinos. Well, not banned completely, he has a $500 limit. They, at least, are convinced he’s the real thing.
While how he does what he does is a mystery, his show is non-stop, high energy entertainment. Suchard keeps his audiences laughing and trying to keep up with his breathless pace.
Yet Suchard, 37, loves his home in Tel Aviv and spending time with his family. His wife works in high-tech and he has two children, a boy and a girl whom he takes to gan every morning when he’s available. Success has not gone to his head. He is amiable, humble and approachable.
Suchard is originally from Haifa and of Romanian descent. His family changed their name while trying to stay ahead of the Nazis.
One would think that Suchard was a perfect candidate for military intelligence, but he served in the Israeli air force. That’s the official story anyway. And it’s a good thing too, because nowadays, his job entails a lot of air travel.
I asked him what he would be if not a mentalist and he said probably a creative director. Aside from performing, he’s authored the book Mind Reader: Unlocking the Power of Your Mind to Get What You Want (already translated into 9 languages) and has opened what we can call an escape empire – ten escape rooms in a complex in Tel-Aviv called Escape City.
So how does he do his prodigious mind reading and predictions? Do you really want to know? That’s the funny thing about this type of entertainment; you want to know how he does it, but you really don’t. Anyway, however it’s done, it’s truly mind-boggling. One of the elements that make his show so exciting is the large amount of audience participation. This also makes it challenging for him and more transparent for us, his audience, because he doesn’t know what to expect either and has to think fast. Suchard claims to have discovered the seeds of his astonishing talents as a young child, but his shows are geared toward the discerning adult.
Suchard always tells people to think positive thoughts because you never know who might be reading them. He tries to encourage positive thinking purely for the sake of making the world a happier place. And he is doing just that.
More significantly, as an Israeli entertainer, what Lior Suchard is also successfully doing is being an ambassador for Israel. He’s creating worldwide positive publicity for the country and that, Suchard will forgive me the word, is truly magic.
Lior Suchard can be contacted through his website at www.liorsuchard.com.