Naphtali Lau-Lavie

Naphtali Lau-Lavie was born in 1926 in Kraków

Naphtali Lau was born in Kraków in 1926 to a rabbinic family in Poland. His father was Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau. During World War II he lived in the Piotrków Trybunalski ghetto, and in July 1941 he was sent to Auschwitz but escaped in a food truck.

In October 1942 his father and his brother Shmuel Yitzhak were deported to Treblinka, where they were killed. In November 1944 his mother placed his younger brother Yisrael with him, and the two were sent to a labor camp in Częstochowa and then to Buchenwald. He saved his brother, who later became Chief Rabbi of Israel.

After the war he moved to Israel and settled in Ramat Gan. From 1956 to 1970 he worked as a journalist at Haaretz under the name Naphtali Lavie. He later made this pen name his official name.

In July 1970 he became spokesman of the Defense Ministry, and in 1977 he joined Moshe Dayan's staff at the Foreign Ministry. He took part in Israel's delegation to the Camp David conference. He was consul general in New York from 1981 to 1985 and then became director general of the United Jewish Appeal in Israel.

In later years he was deputy chairman of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and lectured on the Holocaust. He received the Yakir Yerushalayim award in 2003. He died on December 6, 2014.