Dr SAMUEL PISAR

Samuel Pisar was 10 years old when Hitler and Stalin invaded his native Poland. Interned in Auschwitz and other infernos, he finally escaped from Dachau and was liberated by the American army. Aged 16, he was one of the youngest survivors of , and the only one from his family and school. Taken in by French and Australian relatives, he resumed his studies in Paris, later graduating from the and earning doctorates from Harvard and the Sorbonne. In the 1950s, he served at the and UNESCO, before becoming an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, the State Department and Committees of the Senate and the House. In 1961, he was awarded U.S. citizenship by a special Act of Congress.

As an international lawyer in America, Britain and France, Samuel Pisar has counselled governments, corporations, foundations, the International Olympic Committee and personalities such as Arthur Rubinstein, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Taylor. A defender of freedom and human rights, he took up the causes of Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other political dissidents, as well as many Jewish refuseniks. A widely-solicited lecturer, he has presided at conferences on law, trade and diplomacy and addressed global leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the New York Council on Foreign Relations and the European Parliament. In 1983, he chaired in Paris a world gathering of Nobel laureates, having himself been nominated for the Peace Prize. A board member of various public interest organizations, he is a trustee of Washington’s Brookings Institution, President of France and a director of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

During the cold war, Samuel Pisar urged broader commercial, cultural and human contacts with Eastern Europe, Russia and China as « weapons of peace » to defuse the raging ideological and nuclear confrontation, helping to inspire the Nixon- Kissinger policy of detente. He also shaped pacifying strategies for racial and religious adversaries: Irish Catholics and Protestants, South African blacks and whites; Indians and Pakistanis; and, above all, Israelis and Arabs, in an effort to curb xenophobia, antisemitism and terrorism. In the contexte of “Project Aladdin”, under the auspices of the Shoah Foundation and UNESCO, he accompanied, in 2011, 150 Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders from all continents, including grand muftis, chief rabbis and eminent cardinals, on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp for the 66th anniversary of its liberation. At that epicenter of the greatest catastrophe ever perpetrated by man against man, Pisar bore witness, in the name of its martyrs and survivors to the fact that, far from being a « myth », the Holocaust is an all too real warning for humanity of possible catastrophes yet to come, with plagues of toxic gas, ballistic missiles and nuclear mushroom clouds. Surrounded by the evidence of unimaginable horror and united by common pain, that ecumenical assembly transcended all political, racial and religious strife and prayed for a safer and better future. In the wake of this rare manifestation of inter- faith solidarity in an increasingly fratricidal world, Pisar was invited to testify before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives.

1 His books, published in 20 languages, include Coexistence and Commerce, acclaimed as a work that «charts an enlightened course for American and Western policy” (Senator Edward Kennedy) and “has a vigor that can revive the tired spirits of any jaded businessman or diplomat” (The Financial Times). Of Blood and Hope was greeted as a memoir that « makes us vibrate to varied, changing and awesome emotions» (Le Monde), and “offers powerful testimony to faith, courage and man’s capacity for redemption” (Il Tempo). In the domain of music, Samuel Pisar was notably the author and narrator of the libretto KADDISH for ’s monumental Symphony No. 3, which he has performed widely with orchestras of renown. A recipient of numerous academic and civic distinctions, he has been awarded the French Legion of Honour, the Order of Arts and Letters, the Polish Order of Merit and the Order of Australia, in the name of Queen Elizabeth II. Samuel and his spouse, Judith Pisar (who was Director of the Cunningham Dance Company and President of the American Cultural Center in Paris) have four children, all of whom are dedicated to public service.

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«The Holocaust, attacked by incendiary demagogues as a « myth », is an all too real, existential warning for mankind of horrors yet to come. For it has revealed, as have more recent genocides, that man is still capable of the worst as of the best, of hatred as of love, of madness as of genius, and that the unthinkable remains possible. Unless we espouse and secure, through remembrance and education, the core universal values embedded in all great creeds – spiritual and secular – the forces of darkness may return to haunt us again.» Samuel Pisar

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