Israeli receives Czech honor

The Czech Foreign Ministry honored an Israeli for promoting the Czech Republic.Chanan Rozen, who is in his late 80s, was the oldest person to receive the Gratias Agit award last week at a government ceremony in Prague. Rozen, who was born in the Czech town of Ostrava and immigrated illegally to Palestine in 1939, set up the Israel-Czechoslovak Friendship League together with author Max Brod after Israel was founded in 1948.Rozen still heads the group.”There were symmetries in the fates of the Czech and Jewish nations,” Rozen told Radio Prague. “The Jews lived for a thousand years on Czech territory and they had good relations with the Czechs.”