Israel Shahak

Israel Shahak was born in 1933 in Warsaw

Shahak was born Israel Himmelstaub in Warsaw in 1933, the youngest child of a Zionist Jewish family. During the Nazi occupation the family was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto, and in 1943 to the Poniatowa camp, where his father died. He and his mother escaped, were caught again and held in Bergen-Belsen until its liberation in 1945.

He then emigrated with his mother to the Land of Israel, where a kibbutz turned him down as too thin. He supported his sick mother, studied at a religious boarding school in Kfar Hassidim, and later moved with her to Tel Aviv.

After high school he served in the IDF. He then earned a doctorate in organic chemistry at the Hebrew University, worked with Ernst David Bergmann, and did postdoctoral work at Stanford University from 1961. He returned in 1963 and taught and did research at the Hebrew University until he retired in 1990.

Shahak was active in the League Against Religious Coercion and left it after the 1967 Six-Day War. He led the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, founded a committee against administrative detention, and translated Israeli press reports into English. His writings on Judaism, including a 1994 book, caused controversy.

He lived in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem and never married. He died in 2001 of complications of diabetes.