Yitzhak Shamir

Who was Yitzhak Shamir?

Yitzhak Shamir (help·info) (Hebrew: יצחק שמיר‎, born Icchak Jaziernicki; 15 October 1915 - 30 June 2012) was a former Israeli politician, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, in 1983–84 and 1986–92. Shamir was born in Ruzhany (Yiddish: Rozhinoy, Polish: Różana), Russian Empire (now Belarus). He studied at a Hebrew High School in Białystok, Poland. As a youth he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He studied at the law faculty of Warsaw University, but cut his studies short to immigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1935, after settling in Palestine, he Hebraized his surname to Shamir. In 1944 he married Shulamit Shamir (1923 – July 29, 2011),[1] whom he met in a detention camp. Shulamit immigrated to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria on a rickety boat in 1941 and was sent to prison because she entered the country illegally. They had two children, Yair and Gilada.[2] Shulamit died on July 29, 2011.[3]