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Israel Shahak

Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak.jpg
Native name ישראל שחק
Born Israel Himmelstaub
29 April 1933
Warsaw, Poland
Died 2 July 2001
Jerusalem, Israel
Occupation Professor of chemistry, political scientist, civil rights activist, author
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Israel Shahak (Hebrew: ישראל שחק‎‎; B. Israel Himmelstaub, 28 April 1933 – 2 July 2001) was an Israeli professor of organic chemistry, at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Holocaust survivor, a public intellectual of Liberal political bent, and a civil-rights advocate and activist in behalf of Jew and gentile. For twenty years, he headed the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights (1970–90) and was a public critic of the policies of the governments of Israel. As a public intellectual, Shahak’s works about Judaism proved controversial, especially the book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994).

Israel Shahak was born Israel Himmelstaub, in 1933, in Warsaw, Poland, and was the youngest child of a cultured, Zionist family of Ashkenazi Jews. During the Second World War, the Nazi Occupation of Poland (1939–45) interned the Shahak family to the Warsaw Ghetto; yet his elder brother escaped Poland to Britain, where he joined the Royal Air Force. Meanwhile, life in occupied Poland forced Shahak's mother to pay a Roman Catholic family to hide Israel, whom they returned when she could not afford their safe-keeping him from the Nazis.

In 1943, the Nazis sent the Shahak family to the Poniatowa concentration camp, to the west of Lublin, where his father died. Fortuitously, the ten-year-old boy and his mother escaped the Poniatowa concentration camp, and returned to Warsaw; yet, within a year, whilst emptying the city of Jews, the Nazis recaptured Israel and his mother, and imprisoned them in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in northern Germany. In 1945, the British Army liberated the prisoners of Bergen-Belsen; as displaced persons mother and son managed to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, where Israel’s application to join a kibbutz was denied, because he was physically too-slender.


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