Dov Shilansky

Dov Shilansky was born in 1924 in Šiauliai

Shilansky was born in 1924 in Šiauliai, Lithuania, one of 4 children of a Jewish leather merchant. He studied at the Hebrew Tarbut gymnasium, joined Betar in 1937 and joined the Irgun in 1939. He was held in the Šiauliai ghetto and later in the Stutthof and Dachau camps, and survived the Holocaust.

After the war he joined Irgun activity in Europe and led the group's branch in southern Italy, then commanded it in Germany. In 1948 he married and moved to Israel on the ship Altalena. He fought in the 1948 war and continued in the reserves.

In October 1952 he was arrested at the Foreign Ministry building in Tel Aviv carrying a bomb. He was accused of belonging to an underground group opposed to the reparations agreement with Germany and was sentenced to prison. He wrote a book in prison and later a novel about the Holocaust.

He studied law and qualified as a lawyer in 1963, working in a firm he opened with partners in 1962. He sat on the ethics committee of the Israel Bar Association.

He entered the Knesset for Likud in 1977 and served as a deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Office. As Speaker he started the 1989 project of reading Holocaust victims' names in the Knesset. He lost the 1993 presidential vote to Ezer Weizman, left the Knesset in 1996 and died in 2010.