Israel Har (1932) is an Israeli poet and editor. Har was born in the town of Chelm, Poland in 1932, and came to Israel as an infant, where he was raised and educated . He was one of the young disciples of Chazon Ish. He was a member of the Haganah and Etzel and, after the establishment of the State of Israel, served in the IDF.
For thirty years, he was editor of the IDF’S Knapsack (“Tarmil”) library, through which 200 paperback books from the best classics of world literature were published. He joined the of Keshev Lashira publishing house, in the framework of which his third and fourth books of poetry were published.
In 2006, he was awarded the Teva Prize for Poetry at the Metula Festival of Poetry. The award judges remarked: “the Israeli among poets” – Israel Har’s ‘Israeliness’ stands firm in its splendor: Its foundation lies in a kind of bold merging of the Israeli landscape and settlement, and archaic layers, especially Biblical, of Hebrew. The lines are cut off, the syntax is broken and yet they breathe deep with Hebraism, immersed in patterns of generations of Hebrew which, at the same time, they use as if their own, in the sovereign freedom of a modern poet. Har is the father of a daughter and son.