Yonatan Ratosh

Yonatan Ratosh was the literary pseudonym of Uriel Shelach (November 18, 1908 – March 25, 1981), an Israeli poet and journalist who founded the Canaanite movement.

Biography Uriel Heilperin (later Shelach) was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1908 to a Zionist family. His father, Yechiel, was a Hebraist educator who raised Uriel and his siblings in Hebrew. Ratosh immigrated to Israel in 1919 on board the Ruslan, along with Ratosh came the historian Joseph Klausner, the artist Yitzhak Frenkel and the architect Zeev Rechter. In 1921, the family immigrated to Mandate Palestine. Uriel changed his last name from Heilperin to Shelach, later adopting the pseudonym Yonatan Ratosh in his literary and political writing. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Sorbonne, and published his first poem in 1926. In the mid-1930s, he was appointed editor of HaYarden, the official organ of the Revisionist movement and was active in right-wing underground organizations.

Ratosh was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize.