Ada Aharoni

In 2017 Aharoni published Horizon of Hope: (Gvanim Publishers, Tel Aviv, 2017): A Bilingual poetry collection: English-Hebrew, of love, peace, women poems, and poems based on letters of soldiers to their loved ones in Israel, during the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as anti-terror on Daesh (ISIS).

The Golden Age of the Jews from Egypt – Uprooting and Revival in Israel (Orion Publishing, 2013.) contains 73 stories of Jewish refugees from Egypt compiled by Aharoni.

In 2012, she was awarded the President's Award by Shimon Peres, for Volunteerism and peace culture for promoting peace initiatives between Jews and Arabs. In 2015, she was elected Honorary Citizen of Haifa (Yakir Haifa). She was the first woman, invited to speak in the Mahmood Mosque in Kababir, Haifa in 2012.

Rare Flower (2012), a moving poetry collection about love and peace spans five decades and is dedicated to the memory of her departed husband, Chaim Aharoni, and her departed daughter, Talia Aharoni Winkler. The book was translated into many languages, and nominated for a Nobel Prize, in 2014.

Aharoni organized the Second World Congress of the Jews from Egypt (WCJE) in 2006 at Haifa University. Aharoni served as the president of the organization, assembling 350 researchers and writers. The WCJE held two additional symposiums at Haifa University in 2007 and Bar Ilan University in 2008. Aharoni, Aimee Israel-Pelletier, and Levana Zamir published the proceedings of the congress in History and Culture of the Jews of Egypt in Modern Times (Keness Hafakot, Tel Aviv, 2008), in English, French and Hebrew.

She is the founder and world president of The International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace (IFLAC). Established in 1999, its goal is to build "bridges of understanding and peace through culture, literature and communication." IFLAC Directors and Peace Ambassadors are appointed in some 20 countries. She and Dr. Vijay Kumar Roy have edited 3 anthologies benefiting the organization, focusing on war, terror, and human trafficking.

Aharoni's poems can be broadly divided into three categories: Peace, Love and Women. Often they overlap, and peace, abolishment of war, equality for women, and the power of women for peace are prominent in her poems. One of her most published peace poems is A Bridge of Peace, a message from an Israeli to a Palestinian woman. Robert Nissenson, and Yigal Alfassi composed music to Ada Aharoni's poems. They are sung by Revital Levanon and Anat Yagen and other singers, on the disc “A Green Week” and other discs, and played on radio and TV (1999-2021). Latest discs by singer and composer Shoshia Beeri Dotan “Peace Flower”, and various poems, including “Ä Bridge of Peace” were composed and sung by Shlomo Ron and Rani Hellerman.

Some of these early peace poems are concerned with the struggle for the survival of Israel, as seen in To an Egyptian Soldier (written during the Yom Kippur War), where Aharoni tells him that "you will always have your Nile... but if we lose there's only the sea." The source of this "passionate attachment to her new homeland" is her recollection of what it was to be "an 'outsider', unwanted and not belonging" in Egypt, Len Goldzweig (lecturer in the Dept. of English at Haifa University) writes in the Preface of Aharoni's Poems from Israel (1992).

Aharoni began writing poetry on the theme of war and peace during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippur War). "In most of Aharoni's first published poems on the theme of war and peace, her Egyptian origins linger discreetly in the background," Joel Beinin writes in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, in which he examines the diversity of Egyptian Jewish identities in Egypt and in the diaspora. "The Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and interim Sinai disengagement agreements following the 1973 war apparently encouraged her to advance beyond general calls for peace to articulate more specifically what peace meant to Aharoni through recollections of her previous life in Egypt."

Ada Aharoni received her Bachelor of Arts degree in history, sociology and English literature from the University of Haifa, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1964, she received her M.Phil. Degree on the literature of Henry Fielding, from the University of London's (Birkbeck College) and was awarded her Ph.D. on Saul Bellow's Introspective Fiction at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in 1975.

Aharoni was born in Cairo, in a Jewish family of French nationality. She attended the Alvernia English School for Girls, a convent school in the neighborhood of Zamalek, where she was taught English literature by Irish Franciscan nuns. "At the age of 10 I already decided going to be a writer," she stated during an interview with The Jerusalem Post. In 1949, her father, an export-import merchant of flour, had his work permit revoked, and the Egyptian authorities confiscated the money he had transferred to a Swiss bank. The family moved to France, and Aharoni moved to Israel soon after, at the age of 16. Aharoni was married to Haim Aharoni for 55 years until he died in 2006. He was a professor at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering at Technion. They had two children, Ariel and Talia. Talia died from breast cancer in 2011. Aharoni lives in Haifa, Israel.

The term "Second Exodus" coined by Ada Aharoni, refers to the forced migration of the Jews from Arab countries after the State of Israel was founded in 1948. Out of the estimated million Jews that were displaced, the majority found refuge in Israel, while 650,000 Palestinians fled or were ousted from Israel. This displacement of Jews has been overlooked in the various efforts for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, Aharoni writes in her research paper The Forced Migration of Jews from Arab Countries and Peace, and also in an YnetNews article called What about the Jewish Nakba? She argues that these two tragedies and their commonalities could have a conciliatory effect on both sides which could be beneficial to the promotion of peace.

Ada Aharoni created the film The Pomegranate Of Reconciliation And Honor which highlights the need for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Based on the author's personal experience and that of the Jews from Egypt, Ada Aharoni quotes Elie Wiesel's question at his Nobel Prize Ceremony:"Who is the enemy?" The enemy Wiesel says "Is the whose story you don't know!" Ada Aharoni tells her Palestinian friend that the Palestinian people have succeeded in telling the story of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, but Jews from Arab countries haven't succeeded in spreading similar awareness of the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries. In this film she tells her Palestinian neighbor her story in the hope that by the end of it they will be friends instead of enemies.

Ada Aharoni (Hebrew: עדה אהרוני; born Andrée Yadid, 1933) is an Egyptian-born Israeli poet, writer, lecturer, sociologist and peace researcher. She has published numerous books of peace poetry, historical novels, sociology, history, biography, drama, film-scripts, literary criticism, and children's books. In her work she often focuses on the "Second Exodus", the uprooting of the Jews from Egypt, following the establishment of Israel in 1948, which she personally experienced. Aharoni is the founder and world president of The International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace (IFLAC).