Faina Kirschenbaum

Faina Kirschenbaum was born in 1955 in Lviv

Kirschenbaum was born in Lviv in the Soviet Union and moved to Israel in 1973. She trained as a nurse at the Beilinson School of Nursing. She later earned a BA from Thames Valley University and an MBA from the University of Derby.

In 1981 she settled in Nili in the West Bank, where she became council secretary. She also held roles in the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, the Israeli branch of the World Jewish Congress and the board of the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. From 2003 she was director general of Yisrael Beiteinu.

She entered the Knesset in 2009 from tenth place on the party list. With Danny Danon she proposed parliamentary inquiries into foreign funding of Israeli groups, which the Knesset rejected in 2011. In 2012 she passed an amendment to the child support law, and in 2013 she became Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs.

She was arrested in December 2014 in a corruption investigation and left politics in January 2015. In March 2021 the Tel Aviv District Court convicted her of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, money laundering and tax offenses, and in July 2021 it sentenced her to 10 years in prison. In August 2022 the sentence was reduced to 7.5 years. She is married with 3 children.