Prof. André Chouraqui

Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons - cc-by-sa-3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

• He was born in August 1917 in the city of Ain-Temouchent, Algeria.
• He completed his secondary studies at a boys’ boarding school in Oran.
• Between 1934 and 1939, he studied law at the Sorbonne in Paris.
• From 1937 to 1939, he also studied Hebrew and Aramaic at the Rabbinical Seminary of France.
• In 1939, he was admitted to the French Bar Association, but a year later he was expelled under the anti-Jewish racial laws of the Vichy regime.
• During the Nazi occupation of France (1942–1945), Shuraki went into hiding in the Haute-Loire region and was active in the French Resistance.
• After the war, he returned to Algeria, where he worked as a lawyer and jurist, and was even appointed a judge on the National Court of Appeals.
• In 1948, André Chouraqui received a doctorate in law from the Sorbonne University in Paris.
• From 1947 to 1953, he served as secretary of the international Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and traveled around the world giving lectures on Jewish topics.
• During his life, he taught at the Sorbonne, the Center for Advanced Applied Studies, and the Rabbinical Seminary in Paris.
• In the 1950s, he immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.
• In 1958, following the Wadi Salib events, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion appointed him as an advisor on the integration of immigrants, a role he held from 1959 to 1963.
• In early 1959, he traveled on behalf of the Israeli government to Morocco for a one-week visit, during which he reached understandings with the Moroccan authorities that eased Jewish emigration in exchange for assistance in agriculture and medicine.
• In 1965, he served as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem under Mayor Teddy Kollek and was responsible for the city’s international relations.
• Alongside his political and diplomatic activity, Chouraqui was deeply engaged in interfaith dialogue. He founded conferences promoting cooperation among the three major religions in Israel, with the aim of bringing together representatives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• He was involved in establishing official relations between Israel and the Vatican for the first time in 1993.
• He was awarded the French Legion of Honor three times for his literary work.
• He passed away on July 9, 2007.

Part of the biographical information is based on entries from Wikipedia and is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.