Shimon lev gandhi biography

Shimon Lev (Low) (Hebrew: שמעון לב; born August 1, 1962) is an Israeli multidisciplinary artist, writer, photographer, curator and researcher in the fields of.
Shimon Lev is an Israeli multidisciplinary artist, writer, photographer, curator and researcher in the fields of Indian Studies.
Shimon Lev's study of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach places their friendship against some of the most significant historical events of the early 20th.

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Mahatma Gandhi’s Jewish soulmate

In 2015, a statue commemorating the friendship of Mahatma Gandhi and Jewish architect Hermann Kallenbach was unveiled near a synagogue in Rusnė, Lithuania. This friendship was an important part of the Mahatma’s time in South Africa. Kallenbach used his considerable resources to help Gandhi set up the Tolstoy Farm community in Transvaal, South Africa, in 1910, becoming an ardent early supporter of his experiments with satyagraha.

Israeli multidisciplinary artist Shimon Lev has documented this relationship in his book Soulmates: The Story Of Mahatma Gandhi And Hermann Kallenbach, published in 2012. Lev argues that Gandhi began the transition to the Mahatma during the years spent at the Tolstoy Farm. Meanwhile, Kallenbach immersed himself in Gandhian philosophy, following its moral and political cues through the satyagraha movement in South Africa.

Lev’s study of this personal, cultural and political encounter, mapping the growth of Gandhi and Kallenbach’s belief systems on to their respective national movements, throws new light on a

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Shimon's Quest: From Israel to India, and Lithuania, with a touch of Tagore

Dr Shimon Lev, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is anything but the typical academic. A traveller, columnist, photographer, history sleuth and adventure seeker, he has something of an Indiana Jones about him.

After completing a compulsory three-year stint in the Israeli military (intelligence section), Shimon, like many Israelis, took a break that brought him to India, an event that proved to be defining.

Shimon fell in love with India with all its faults, peculiarities and attractions. This was in 1985. Since then he has been returning to India once or twice every year, building relations and trying to unearth linkages that go beyond ancient history.

Unlike the celluloid Jones, Shimon is not after crystal skulls or hidden treasure; his is a quest for the links that tie his beloved Israel with India. This was the motive that launched his academic career.

On his return from India and Nepal after a one-and-a-half-year sojourn, Shimon had taken up a photography course. For many years he wor

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Hermann Kallenbach was Gandhi's 'wailing wall': Shimon Lev

LONDON: Priceless documents discovered in Israel have revealed, for the first time ever, the role a Jewish architect played in creating the phenomenon that was Mahatma Gandhi. When Lithuania unveils the statue of Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach in Rusne on October 2, researcher Shimon Lev of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, who has extensively studied the archive, will reveal to the world the story of the deep friendship between India's father of the nation and his "soulmate". Excerpts from Lev's exclusive interview to TOI:

How did you get your hand on the Gandhi Kallenbach documents?

Some years ago, I wrote a series of articles about a hiking trail across Israel. During my hike, in a cemetery near the Sea of the Galilee, I went to see the neglected grave of Kallenbach. I published a few lines about him, which resulted in an invitation from his niece, Mrs Isa Sarid, to "have a look" at Kallenbach's archive. The archive was located in a tiny room in a small apartment up on Carmel Mountain in Haifa. On the shelves were num