Szymon Perski (1923-2016)

Shimon Peres ( listen ; Hebrew: שמעון פרס‎; born Szymon Perski; August 2, 1923 – September 28, 2016) was an Israeli statesman and the ninth President of Israel, serving from 2007 to 2014.

Early life

Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski, on August 2, 1923, in Wiszniew, Poland (now Vishnyeva, Belarus), to Yitzhak (1896–1962) and Sara (1905–1969 née Meltzer) Perski. The family spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home, and Peres learned Polish at school. He then learned to speak English and French. His father was a wealthy timber merchant, later branching out into other commodities; his mother was a librarian. Peres had a younger brother, Gershon, and was a relative of American film star Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske).

Shimon Peres (standing, third from right) with his family, ca. 1930

Peres told Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson that he had been born as a result of a blessing his parents had received from a chassidic rebbe and that he was proud of it. Peres' grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, a grandson of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, had a great impact on his life. In an interview, Peres said: "As a child, I grew up in my grandfather's home. … I was educated by him. … My grandfather taught me Talmud. It was not as easy as it sounds. My home was not an observant one. My parents were not Orthodox but I was Haredi. At one point, I heard my parents listening to the radio on the Sabbath and I smashed it." When he was a child, Peres was taken by his father to Radun' to receive a blessing from Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (known as "the Chofetz Chaim"). As a child, Peres would later say, "I did not dream of becoming president of Israel. My dream as a boy was to be a shepherd or a poet of stars." He inherited his love of French literature from his maternal grandfather.

"Israeli children should be taught to look to the future, not live in the past. I would rather teach them to imagine than to remember."

Shimon Peres, 2000

In 1932, Peres' father immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. The family followed him in 1934. He attended Balfour Elementary School and High School, and Geula Gymnasium (High School for Commerce) in Tel Aviv. At 15, he transferred to Ben Shemen agricultural school and lived on Kibbutz Geva for several years. Peres was one of the founders of Kibbutz Alumot.

In 1941 he was elected Secretary of HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed, a Labor Zionist youth movement, and in 1944 returned to Alumot, where he had an agricultural training and worked as a farmer and a shepherd.

A picture of 13-year-old Shimon Peres taken in 1936.

At age 20, he was elected to the HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed national secretariat, where he was only one of two Mapai party supporters, out of the 12 members. Three years later, he took over the movement and won a majority. The head of Mapai, David Ben-Gurion, and Berl Katznelson began to take an interest in him, and appointed him to Mapai's secretariat.

In 1944, Peres led an illicit expedition into the Negev, then a closed military zone requiring a permit to enter. The expedition, consisting of a group of teenagers, along with a Palmach scout, a zoologist, and an archaeologist, had been funded by Ben-Gurion and planned by Palmach head Yitzhak Sadeh, as part of a plan for future Jewish settlement of the area so as to include it in the Jewish state. The group was arrested by a Bedouin camel patrol led by a British officer, taken to Beersheba (then a small Arab town) and incarcerated in the local jail. All of the participants were sentenced to two weeks in prison, and as the leader, Peres was also heavily fined.

All of Peres' relatives who remained in Wiszniew in 1941 were murdered during the Holocaust, many of them (including Rabbi Meltzer) burned alive in the town's synagogue.

In 1945, Peres married Sonya Gelman, who preferred to remain outside the public eye. They had three children.

In 1946, Peres and Moshe Dayan were chosen as the two youth delegates in the Mapai delegation to the Zionist Congress in Basel.

In 1947, Peres joined the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces. David Ben-Gurion made him responsible for personnel and arms purchases; he was appointed to head the naval service when Israel received independence in 1948.

Peres was director of the Defense Ministry's delegation in the United States in the early 1950s. While in the U.S. he studied English, economics, and philosophy at The New School and New York University, and advanced management at Harvard University.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Shimon Peres

• Official Israeli Presidency website
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• Official channel on YouTube
• The day Peres became a Sheikh!
  فارسی:

• Peres Center for Peace
• Biography at the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Shimon Peres biography at the Jewish Virtual Library
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Column archive at The Guardian
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• Template:JPosttopic
• Szymon Perski collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• BBC – Sharon seals new Israel coalition
• Peres's metaphysical propensity to lose by Matthew Wagner, published in The Jerusalem Post, November 10, 2005.
• Former Labor Leader Shimon Peres Heading For Sharon's new party – recorded Report from IsraCast.
• Shimon Peres speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations about the Israel/Lebanon conflict on July 31, 2006
• Shimon Peres speaks at Cornell University – "A Conversation with Shimon Peres"
• "Presidency rounds off 66-year career" by Amiram Barkat, Haaretz
• President Peres' address to the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 2008
• Segment Interview on YouTube by Leon Charney on The Leon Charney Report
• Full Interview on YouTube by Leon Charney on The Leon Charney Report

Party political offices
Preceded by Yitzhak Rabin	Leader of the Alignment 1977–1992	Succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin
	Leader of the Labor Party 1995–1996	Succeeded by Ehud Barak
Preceded by Amram Mitzna	Leader of the Labor Party 2003–2005	Succeeded by Amir Peretz
Political offices
Preceded by Yitzhak Rabin	Prime Minister of Israel Acting 1977	Succeeded by Menachem Begin
Preceded by Yitzhak Shamir	Prime Minister of Israel 1984–1986	Succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir
Preceded by Yitzhak Rabin	Prime Minister of Israel 1995–1996	Succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu
Preceded by Moshe Katsav	President of Israel 2007–2014	Succeeded by Reuven Rivlin

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