Yitzhak Shamir — prime minister with roots in the Russian Empire
Yitzhak Shamir was born Yitzhak Yezernitsky on 22 October 1915 (some sources give 15 October) in Ruzhany, a predominantly Jewish town in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Belarus. The area had been occupied by the German army earlier that year, and remained under German military administration until the end of the First World War; it then became part of the restored Polish state, where Shamir grew up. He attended a Hebrew secondary school in Białystok, joined a Zionist youth movement and began to study law at the University of Warsaw.
In 1935 he left his studies and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, enrolling at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and working in an accountant's office. His parents and two sisters, who stayed behind, were killed in the Holocaust. He joined the Irgun, the Jewish underground organisation, and when it split in 1940 followed the faction that became Lehi. Arrested by the British authorities in 1941, he escaped from detention in 1942 and became one of Lehi's three leaders in 1943; the name Shamir came from a forged identity card.
After some years in business, he served in a senior post in the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, from 1955 to 1965. He joined Menachem Begin's Herut movement in 1969, was elected to the Knesset in 1973 and became Speaker of the Knesset after the 1977 election. In March 1980 Begin appointed him Minister of Foreign Affairs.
When Begin resigned in 1983, Shamir succeeded him as leader of the Likud and as Prime Minister, presenting his government on 10 October 1983. After the inconclusive election of 1984 he entered a national unity government with Shimon Peres under a rotation agreement, serving as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister until October 1986, when he became Prime Minister again. He remained in office, after the 1988 election heading a second unity government and then a narrower coalition, until the election of 1992. His premiership included the Gulf War of 1991 and the Madrid peace conference of October 1991. He stayed in the Knesset until 1996.
Shamir died in Tel Aviv on 30 June 2012, aged ninety-six.
"Grew up in interwar Poland, studied in Białystok and Warsaw, and emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Ruzhany, Grodno Governorate (now Brest Region, Belarus)
Born Yitzhak Yezernitsky in Ruzhany, in the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire, in October 1915, when the area was already under German military occupation; after the First World War the town became part of Poland, where he grew up.
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Ruzhany, Grodno Governorate (now Brest Region, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.