PLONSK, Poland (AFP) - Former Israeli premier Shimon Peres has travelled to the Polish town of Plonsk, birthplace 120 years ago of David Ben Gurion, to pay tribute to Israel´s founding father and first prime minister.

"I´m very moved at being here in Plonsk, the town that gave the Jews Ben Gurion," Peres said Monday during a meeting with municipal councillors in the town, 60 kilometres (40 miles) northwest of Warsaw.

"Ben Gurion was the leader of a state that had never existed before, of a country that was nothing more than desert. He went to war without having an army," said Peres, speaking in Hebrew, with his remarks translated into Polish.

"He created a nation. Today, thanks to him we have a state and an army to defend us."

Peres added: "People in Israel are convinced that without him the Jewish state would never have been born. Ben Gurion was a genius.

"That´s why for us Jews Plonsk is a historical place but also a symbol and a sign of hope."

Peres, number two in Israeli prime minister-designate Ehud Olmert´s Kadima party and a winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, arrived in Poland Sunday.

On Tuesday he is to take part for the first time in the March of the Living, an annual tribute to Holocaust victims at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland, which was run by the Nazis who occupied Poland during World War II from 1939 to 1945.

Peres said in Plonsk: "Some 3.5 millions Jews lived in Poland before the war. The German Nazis killed most of them."

Plonsk is a town of 24,000 inhabitants. Before World War II it had some 12,000 citizens. More than half were Jews, but today there are few visible reminders that they ever existed.

The town´s synagogue survived the war but was demolished by Poland´s communist authorities in the 1950s.

The site of the house where Ben Gurion was born under the name David Grun is marked by a symbolic tree.

Officially Ben Gurion, who became the first prime minister of the independent state of Israel after World War II, was born on October 16, 1886.

But after combing though archives Polish historians recently found Ben Gurion´s birth certificate, according to which he was born on February 18, 1887, said Anna Goliasz, an official in charge of a local exhibition on Israel´s founding father.

"What´s more, he had a twin. That´s specified in the birth certificate, which is written in Russian -- Poland being under Russian occupation at the time," Goliasz said.

The authorities in Plonsk now aim to open a Ben Gurion museum in the town centre, near where his family home once stood. Work could get underway this year.

Since 1997, Plonsk has been twinned with Israel´s Ramat-Negev region, where Ben Gurion lived in a kibbutz after he withdrew from political life and where he died on December 1, 1973.

It was near Plonsk, in the village of Salomonka, that Ben Gurion as a member of a Zionist group helped found the first kibbutz. (Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. 04/24/06)