Born, 18 Dec. 1930, Czernowitz, North Bucovina (then Romania, now Ukraine) to his late parents Zadcanit (Fradia, nee Lerner) and David Gurvitz.

The survivors were brutally deported, August–October 1941, by the Romanian Fascist authorities to the ghettoes and death camps of Transnistria, (an area between the rivers Dniester and Bug, governed by Romania 1941-1944).

In 1946, they crossed the  Soviet border to Romania, from there to Yugoslavia,  embarking on an illegal cargo ship of Jewish refugees (Aliah Bet), survivors of the Holocaust, on the Adriatic coast, heading for Eretz Israel.

Since his retirement from the MFA (1996) he has been Research Fellow at the Abba Eban  Center for Israeli Diplomacy, Harry Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

(3)  In the Shadow of Destruction: Recollections of Transnistria and the Illegal Immigration to Eretz-Israel (Hebrew) Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 1999; Yiddish, Peretz Press, Tel Aviv, 2002; English, Vallentine Mitchell, London & Portland 2007.

Romanian, Sub Spectrul Distrugerii, Hasefer, Bucharest, 2007; German, Im Schatten der Vernichtung, Herausgegeben von Erhard Roy Wiehn, Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz, Germany, 2018.

(7) Co-Editor with Moshe Yegar and Arye Oded of: Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs: The First Fifty Years (Hebrew), Two volumes, Keter Press, Jerusalem, 2002.