Haim Gouri, the renowned writer and journalist considered one of Israel’s most important intellectual thinkers, died Wednesday at the age of 94. Gouri received several of Israel’s highest accolades for his work as a writer and poet, including the Bialik Prize and the Israel Prize.
Gouri was a prominent figure among Israel’s founding generation, and his work is inextricably linked with much of the State of Israel’s national ethos. He will be laid to rest in the special section for those honored by the city of Jerusalem (Yakirei Yerushalyim) in the Har Hamenuchot cemetery.
A number of his most famous poems became some of Israel’s most beloved songs, particularly those about the 1948 War of Independence and the founding of the State of Israel. He became well-known to the Israeli public for his coverage as a journalist of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said both he and his wife mourned the Gouri, the “nation’s contemporary poet,” calling him “a man who became a symbol. The poet of independence, the poet of friendship, a warrior and intellectual.”
Rivlin added that Gouri was teacher of life and a guide, a member of the generation of the founders of Israel and who became the founder of our greatest poetry and work “through which he strengthened the moral and fundamental foundations of our existence here as a people, as a nation.”
“We loved him greatly, his wisdom and his Israeliness,” said Rivlin. The president sent his condolences to Gouri’s widow Aliza (Alika) and his family.
Gouri was born in 1923 in Tel Aviv in British Mandatory Palestine. His parents, Gila and Yisrael Gurfinkel, arrived to Israel on a ship from Odessa in 1919. He grew up in a non-religious home. His father was a labor leader and politician, who served as member of the Knesset for Mapai from its beginning in 1949 until his death in 1965.
Gouri attended the Kadoorie Agricultural High School and was among the first to enlist in the Palmach, the elite pre-state strike force of the Haganah, after graduating in 1941. He picked up the nickname “Juri” in the Palmach. Later, as a platoon commander in the 1st Battalion, he participated in a large number of underground military operations against the British, including the attack on the Stella Maris radar station in Haifa in 1946, bringing illegal Jewish immigrants ashore from the ship “Hannah Szenes,” and the 1946 “Night of the Bridges” in which the Palmach tried to blow up all the railway bridges connecting Palestine to its neighboring countries.
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At the same time, he called himself the “court poet” and wrote a number of well-known poems, many of which were later turned into popular songs.
In 1947, at age 23 and with experience with weapons, fieldcraft and explosives, he was sent by the Haganah to Europe to aid Holocaust survivors and prepare them for aliyah to Israel. He later wrote that his work was to turn the “remnants of the survivors into an organized camp on its way to the Land of Israel.” He remained in Europe, where the newly founded Israel Defense Forces sent him to Czechoslovakia.
He then served as a commander in the first paratroopers course for the IDF, which trained Jewish soldiers who served as paratroopers in the Allied armies during World War II, along with refugees from Hungary. “To take a Holocaust refugee and turn him into a paratrooper is a great thing. When I parachuted with the survivors I understood that this was why I was sent there, to reach this moment,” he said.
Article source: http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/EU-and-Norway-to-hold-urgent-meeting-on-Israeli-Palestinian-crisis-540085
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