Isaac David Knafo

Isaac David Knafo was a writer, artist, and activist born in Mogador, Morocco, and educated in Paris. A prominent cultural figure in Morocco, Knafo was well known among the intelligentsia of Mogador for his first book, Les jeux et les rimes and later for his anti-Nazi pamphlet Les Hitlériques. The laws of the Vichy regime increasingly affected the rights and liberties of Jews in Morocco; in 1942, at the urging of the Jewish community, Knafo burned all the available copies of the pamphlet. A sole surviving exemplar was discovered in 1995. Knafo became an active member of the Zionist movement, immigrating to Israel in 1956 and settling on kibbutz Ramat ha-Kovesh. In Israel, he continued publishing poems, stories, and memoirs and exhibited a collection of one hundred paintings in 1973.