Anastassia Michaeli

Anastassia Michaeli was born in 1975 in Saint Petersburg

Michaeli was born in Leningrad in the Soviet Union to a Christian family. She attended a school focused on English and helped support her family by tutoring children in English. As a teen she was active in sports, especially cross country skiing.

She earned a master's degree in electrical engineering and communications at the Saint Petersburg University of Telecommunications. In 1995 she was chosen as Miss St. Petersburg and spent a year working as a model in Paris. In Israel she studied in an ulpan and earned a diploma in business administration from Bar-Ilan University.

In 1997 she married Israeli businessman Josef Samuelson and moved to Israel. She underwent an Orthodox conversion to Judaism, and the couple remarried according to religious law in 2000. They live in Rishon LeZion with their 8 children.

Her media career began in 1998. In 2002 she joined the Russian-language channel Israel Plus, where she presented the daily show Life's Pleasures and later the morning program.

She ran with Kadima in 2006 but did not win a seat. In 2009 she entered the 18th Knesset from ninth place on the Yisrael Beiteinu list and chaired friendship leagues with Estonia, Austria and Switzerland. The Knesset Ethics Committee reprimanded her for trying to disrupt a speech by MK Hanin Zuabi, and in 2012 suspended her for 4 weeks after she threw water on MK Raleb Majadele.