Shlomo Kalo

Shlomo Kalo was born in 1928 in Sofia

Shlomo Kalo was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1928. At 12 he joined an anti-Fascist underground. At 15 he was imprisoned in a camp in Somovit.

In 1946 he won a prize in a poetry competition and moved to Prague. There he studied medicine at Charles University and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1958 he received an M.Sc. in microbiology from Tel Aviv University.

In 1948 he joined Mahal and trained as a pilot in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia. He immigrated to Israel in 1949. For 26 years, until 1988, he directed the medical laboratories of Kupat Holim Klalit in Rishon LeZion.

His first Hebrew book, a short story collection, appeared in 1954. In 1969 he described a spiritual turn in his life and founded DAAT Publications. He translated Eastern classics such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching, and wrote philosophy, fiction and songs, including the historical novel The Chosen.

From 1979 a group called DAAT formed around him, and it disbanded in 2009. In 1990 he married the singer Rivka Zohar. He died at his home in Jaffa in 2014.