Ronny Naftaniel

Who is Ronny Naftaniel?

Ronald Maurice Naftaniel is the director of the Centrum Informatie en Documentatie Israël, in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Ronny Naftaniel is the son of a German Jew who had survived the Holocaust in the Netherlands after already having fled Nazi Germany in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht in 1938. Naftaniel's father was immediately interned in Westerbork - in 1938 a refugee camp where Jews from Germany who had fled Nazi Germany were brought to - after crossing the border with the Netherlands. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he succeeded in preventing his own deportation to the death camps in occupied Poland. He was liberated by Canadian forces in 1945 while still being held in Westerbork, which had been transformed into a transit camp for more than 100,000 Dutch Jews to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt by the Nazis.

Ronny Naftaniel grew up in a liberal Jewish family, which didn't have much to do with the religious side of Judaism. During the roary 1960s, Naftaniel developed a particular interest in politics, especially in the left-wing Pacifist Socialist Party.