Ari Rath

Ari Rath was born in 1925 in Vienna

Ari Rath was born Arnold Rath in Vienna in 1925, the second son of Laura and Josef Rath, a paper merchant. His mother died in 1929. After the Anschluss, his father was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938.

In 1938 he left Vienna by train for Trieste with his older brother and reached Mandate Palestine on an Italian ship. He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hamadia and lived there for 16 years. He studied history and economics, and in 1946 the Habonim movement sent him to the United States.

He joined The Jerusalem Post in 1957, became an editor in 1975 and editor-in-chief in 1979, sharing the post with Erwin Frenkel. He left in 1989 after the paper was sold to Conrad Black. He then wrote as a freelancer and taught at the University of Potsdam.

Rath supported peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians and was a founding member of the Next Century Foundation. He regained Austrian citizenship in 2007 and published his memoirs in 2012. He died in Vienna in 2017 and was buried near his brother at Givat HaShlosha.