Eliyahu Ben-Elissar

Eliyahu Ben-Elissar was born in 1932 in Radom

He was born Eli Gottlieb in Radom, Poland, in 1932, the youngest child of Eliezer and Hela Gottlieb. His father and uncle owned a foundry. In 1942 he reached Mandate Palestine with a group exchanged for German Templers, traveling in place of a boy the Nazis had deported.

He grew up in Tel Aviv, studied at the Bilu School and joined Betar. After the war he learned that his father had died in the Flossenbürg camp and his mother in a road accident. He later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned a doctorate in Geneva in 1969.

While a student in Paris he was recruited to the Mossad, where he served for 13 years until 1965. From 1971 to 1977 he was spokesman for Herut and the Likud. In 1977 Menachem Begin named him Director-General of the Prime Minister's Office, and he led the Israeli delegation to peace talks in Cairo.

In 1980 he became Israel's first ambassador to Egypt. He served in the Knesset for the Likud from 1981 to 1996 and chaired the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in 2 terms. He was ambassador to the United States from 1996 and to France from 1998.

In August 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak informed him that his term would end. He died of a heart attack in Paris on 12 August 2000 and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.