Marek Halter biography

Marek Halter was born in 1936 in Warsaw, from where he escaped to the USSR in 1940 after six months in the ghetto. In 1946 he returned to Poland before moving with his family to Paris. In 1954 he won a prestigious painting prize from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts but did not forget his background and began publishing articles denouncing racism and anti-Semitism and to plead the cause of human rights. On the eve of the Six Days War in 1967, Marek Halter met with General de Gaulle while the Arab armies were surrounding the Jewish state and launched an international appeal for peace, travelling several times to the Middle East to foster dialogue between Israeli and Arab leaders, many of whom he met in person.

With his wife Clara, Halter founded a magazine for peace in the Middle East called Elements, which was the first magazine that Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs worked on together. During that period he also created several international campaigns in support of Soviet Jews.

From 1973-1974 he was an artist in residence at Harvard University where he lectured on "Art and Politics" before returning to France to publish his autobiography: The Jester and the Kings which won the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. He campaigned at various times for the release of the Argentinean journalist Jacob Timmerman, Andre Sakharoff and Anatoly Chtcharansky and around that time founded "SOS Racisme" with a group of young people, to oppose racism and anti-Semitism in France.

In June 1985, he met Pope John-Paul II at the Vatican to begin a permanent exchange of ideas between the Catholic Church and Judaism. Believing strongly in the future of the European Union, Marek Halter also worked with Simone Veil, the former president of the European Parliament and the President of the Shoah Foundation to start the European Foundation for Science, Art and Culture.

In 1987-1988, together with Andrei Sakharov he helped establish two French University Colleges in Russia; one in Moscow, the other in St. Petersburg, of which he is the president. They are only two foreign universities in Russia with over 3000 students between them and are jointly sponsored by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Sarkozy.

His 20-plus books and essays include The Book of Abraham, the 2000 year old story of a Jewish family, which sold over five million copies and stayed eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His trilogy about the women of the Bible, Sarah, Tsippora, and Lilah was translated into 22 languages. His most recent book is The Queen of Saba which sold 68,000 copies in the first five weeks. His film credits include The Righteous, a film in two parts about the men and women who saved Jewish lives during World War II. The film opened the Berlin film Festival.

Marek Halter collaborates with dozens of newspapers and magazines around the world, including Libération, Paris-Match, Die Welt, VSD, El Pais, The Jesusalem Post, The Forward, La Repubblica and Expressen, amongst others.