Levi Eshkol — prime minister with roots in the Russian Empire
Levi Eshkol was born Levi Yitzhak Shkolnik on 25 October 1895 in Oratov, a shtetl in the Lipovets district of the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Orativ in Ukraine's Vinnytsia Oblast. He was the second of nine children of Joseph Shkolnik and Dvora, née Krasnyanskaya; his mother came from a Hasidic family, his father from a 'Lithuanian' scholarly background. He was schooled in Oman and Odessa and attended secondary school in Vilna, where he became involved in the Zionist movement.
In January 1914, at eighteen, he set out with a group from the Hapoel Hatzair youth movement for the port of Trieste and sailed to Jaffa, in Ottoman Palestine. He worked as a farm labourer and watchman, then on a pumping station, and was elected to the workers' agricultural council of Petah Tikva. During the First World War he volunteered for the Jewish Legion of the British Army, and in September 1920 he was among the twenty-five founders of Kibbutz Degania Bet, which remained his home.
He worked in the agricultural centre of the Histadrut labour federation, and in the 1930s ran a Jewish resettlement office in Berlin. In 1937 he founded Mekorot, the water company that became Israel's national water utility, and directed it until 1951. He joined the Haganah staff, and in 1947 organised the recruitment drive for what became the Israel Defense Forces.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 he became director-general of the Ministry of Defence and head of the Jewish Agency's settlement department. He was Minister of Agriculture and Development from 1951 to 1952 and Minister of Finance from 1952 to 1963, serving under David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. When Ben-Gurion resigned in June 1963, Eshkol succeeded him as Prime Minister on 26 June, also holding the defence portfolio until 1967. His premiership included the Six-Day War of June 1967, on the eve of which he formed a government of national unity, and in 1968 he brought three labour parties together into the Israel Labour Party.
He died in office in Jerusalem on 26 February 1969, aged seventy-three, the first Israeli prime minister to die in office. He was succeeded by Golda Meir.
"Left for Ottoman Palestine in January 1914 with a group of the Hapoel Hatzair movement, sailing from Trieste to Jaffa."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Oratov, Lipovets uyezd, Kiev Governorate (now Orativ, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine)
Born Levi Yitzhak Shkolnik in Oratov, in the Kiev Governorate, in 1895, he was schooled in Oman, Odessa and Vilna and left for Palestine at eighteen, in 1914.
Led Israel during the Six-Day War.
.svg?width=900)
Oratov, Lipovets uyezd, Kiev Governorate (now Orativ, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.