05 May, 2006
Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, and Czech-Jewish writer Arnost Lustig are to receive honorary doctorates from the University of Haifa in Israel. Havel and Lustig will be awarded in late May, according to the Czech newspaper "Pravo". Havel, 69, has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Lustig, 79, for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lustig, who lives in the United States since the 1970s, has written more than two dozen books, mainly novels, but also short stories and dramas, most of which concern life and death in Nazi concentration camps. Havel, originally a playwright who later led the anti-Communist movement in Czechoslovakia, has done much for the local Jewish community, advocating restitution of property and Holocaust education.
