Shimon Peres (

listen (helpinfo); Hebrew: ; born Szymon Perski; 2 August 1923 28

September 2016) was a Polish-bornIsraeli statesman. He was the ninth President of Israel, serving
from 2007 to 2014. Peres served twice as the Prime Minister of Israeland twice as Interim Prime
Minister, and he was a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years.[1] Peres
was elected to the Knesset in November 1959 and, except for a three-month-long hiatus in early
2006, served continuously until 2007, when he became President.
He held several diplomatic and military positions during and directly after Israel's War of
Independence. His first high-level government position was as Deputy Director-General of Defense
in 1952, and Director-General from 1953 until 1959. [2] During his career, he represented five political
parties in the Knesset: Mapai, Rafi, the Alignment, Labor and Kadima, and led Alignment and Labor.
Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace
talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords.[2]
Peres was nominated in early 2007 by Kadima to run in that year's presidential election, and was
elected by the Knesset to the presidency on 13 June 2007 and sworn into office on 15 July 2007 for
a seven-year term.[3][4] He was the first former Prime Minister to be elected President of Israel. At the
time of his retirement in 2014, he was the world's oldest head of state. In his private life, he was an
amateur poet, with some of his poems being turned into songs.[5]
Following a massive stroke, Peres died after two weeks of hospitalization at the Sheba medical
center near Tel-Aviv on 28 September 2016.[6][7]
Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski, on 2 August 1923,[8][9] in Wiszniew, Poland (nowVishnyeva,
Belarus), to Yitzhak (18961962) and Sara (19051969 ne Meltzer) Perski. [2][10]The family
spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home, and Peres learned Polish at school. He then learned
to speak English and French.[11] His father was a wealthy timber merchant, later branching out into
other commodities; his mother was a librarian. Peres had a younger brother, Gershon, [12] and was a
relative of American film star Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Persky).[13][14]
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.[15]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."[16] 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").[17]

In 1932, Peres' father immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. The family followed
him in 1934.[12] He attendedBalfour Elementary School and High School, and Geula Gymnasium
(High School for Commerce) in Tel Aviv. At 15, he transferred toBen Shemen agricultural school and
lived on Kibbutz Geva for several years.[12] 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 worked as a dairy farmer, shepherd, and kibbutz secretary.
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. [18]
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.[19] 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. [20]
All of Peres' relatives who remained in Wiszniew in 1941 were murdered during the Holocaust,
[21]

many of them (including Rabbi Meltzer) burned alive in the town's synagogue. [22]

In 1945, Peres married Sonya Gelman, who preferred to remain outside the public eye. They had
three children.[23]
In 1946, Peres and Moshe Dayan were chosen as the two youth delegates in the Mapai delegation
to the Zionist Congress inBasel.[18]
In 1947, Peres joined the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces. David BenGurion made him responsible for personnel and arms purchases; he was appointed to head the
naval service when Israel received independence in 1948. [19]
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.[24][25][26]